collaborative editing environments

[Eric Johansson]

On 3/5/2013 1:38 PM, Dave Angel wrote:
> On 03/05/2013 12:56 PM, Eric Johansson wrote:
>> I finally have an intern helping me with my various accessibility
>> projects. We need to do pair programming so he can write the code in my
>> head that I can't express by broken hand or speech recognition (yet).
>>
>> The best technique with come up with so far is to use putty sessions
>> with the same layout and use dtach into one emacs.
>
>
> Nonideal but it kind
>> of sort of works after fashion. we are constrained that neither of us
>> will poke holes in our firewalls to allow a peer-to-peer system to work
>> so we will need a third system intermediary.
>
> Call that intermediary the "host" machine.

I prefer to think of it as a proxy or relay host. :-) In my perfect 
world, it would host no data, only relay traffic between a group of users.
>
> If host is running on a Linux box, you could run 'screen' or one of 
> its variants (such as tmux).  Screen lets you have multiple consoles 
> run through one ssh session, and presents them on your remote as one 
> console.  Keystrokes let you switch which console you're connected to 
> at the moment.  And another user can be given permissions to see 
> exactly the same screen session.  So you can chat on one console, and 
> emacs on another, all within the same screen.  Naturally, you can run 
> multiple screens, on independent ssh sessions, if that suits you better.

Been there, done that and I will tell you that if you are see using 
speech recognition, it's the fourth closest definition to hell I can 
possibly think of. in band keystrokes always get in the way because some 
application makes use of them. If they are sufficiently secure to not 
interfere, then they are bitch to remember. ideally, there would be an 
out of band API that I could drive from my speech recognition command 
extension environment and control the connection multiplexer.

This is another reason for a local editor, it's easier to speech enable 
when the environment is nearby.

I will thank you for this because you reminded me that team viewer 
didn't suck too bad and my intern could be the one with the live editor 
and I'm just watching and commenting over Skype
>
> No experience accessing it from Windows, but putty will probably do it.
>
it could.

> I've done remote collaboration this way, while using a satellite 
> connection that's hopeless for gui environments.

fortunately, I'm only going as far as Estonia which is reasonably well 
connected