Working From Off Campus

If you are not on campus and need to use the specialized software available on the TREE domain computers, your choices are either to use the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) program to log into one of the computers in the lab or to get the software you need and to install it on your home computer and work from there.

The problem with RDC is that although it is free (it is provided as part of both Windows and OS X; Linux users should investigate VNC for the same purpose), it can be slow to use because every pixel that changes on the screen has to be transmitted from the lab to your home computer. Even with a good Internet connection, it can be frustrating to use.

Students in CS-343 using the Quartus software in the lab can download a free “Web Edition” copy of that software from the Altera web site. It’s a big download, and you have to register with them to get the free license for running the program, but for our purposes it is exactly the same as the software that runs in the lab.

Students using Dreamweaver and Fireworks, however, do not have access to free versions of those programs to use at home. A good, free, programmer’s editor will let you edit your code just about as efficiently as you can when using Dreamweaver. There are several good alternatives to choose from. For Windows users, you might use Notepad++ or Vim, both of which are also installed on the computers in the lab. Do not use the Notepad program that comes with Windows: it is not a programmer’s editor and is not suitable for writing code. Macintosh users might want to try either TextWrangler or Vim. Linux users probably already have a favorite programmer’s editor. If not, Vim is probably easier to use than emacs, both of which are normally included in all Linux distributions.

An excellent alternative to Dreamweaver is Aptana Studio, which is available as either a standalone program or as a plugin for the popular Eclipse development environment.

Aptana Studio may not have as many features as Dreamweaver, but the ones it does have are precisely the ones we need in our Web projects, including the ability to upload code to a remore site, making it an ideal tool for us. It is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Unfortunately, I have not written up any documentation on how to use it yet.

Although we may use Fireworks or Photoshop for preparing images for the web, you may use any program you find that is capable of producing the effects we use in the course. I have found the free Inkscape program to be good once you figure out how to use it. ImageMagick and the GIMP are two other excellent no-cost tools to consider investigating for image processing.

The main issue this page deals with is how to get your projects transferred from your off-campus computer to the lab so I can check them. You could copy your work onto a USB drive, bring it to The College, and transfer it to your account using one of the computers in A-205. Alternatively, you can transfer the files to your account over the Internet. Here’s how.

First, you need a free program that will let you log into your account from off-campus and transfer files to (or from) the lab server machine, Oak. Aptana Studio can do the job, and is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. But if you prefer a simpler set up, Windows users will find that WinSCP is very good; Macintosh users will find that Fugu works very well. There are programs with a graphical user interface for Linux too, but I personally just use scp from the command line when working with Linux, so I can’t suggest a particular graphical program, other than Aptana Studio.

Install your program, and tell it to connect to any computer in the lab (even one that someone else is using at the time is okay), giving the username and password for your account. You cannot log into Oak directly, but using WinSCP, Fugu, or scp, logging into any computer in the lab will give you direct access to your “home directory,” which is actually located only on Oak. You can copy files and folders between your off-campus computer and your home directory using drag and drop if you are using WinSCP or Fugu. See the scp “man page” for how to do it from Linux. scp a_file.xhtml [youraccountname]@cherry.cs.qc.cuny.edu:htdocs would copy a file named a_file.xhtml from the current directory to the htdocs directory in your H: drive on Oak, for example.

[Starting Spring 2013, the following material is not important. Once you have copied your files to H:\htdocs you can test your web site using the Apache server running on Oak.] But you are not done yet. Now you have to copy (or move) your project from your home directory to your roaming profile. You cannot do this using WinSCP, Fugu, or scp; you have to be logged into one of the machines in the lab either by sitting at it or by using RDC. Log in, open Windows Explorer (I suggest clicking on the icon for the computer in the upper left corner of the screen), and you will find that you have an H: drive in addition to the usual C: drive. Open your H: drive, and you will find that it contains your home directory, the place where you copied your work in the previous step. Just drag your project into the proper directory (folder) under My Documents, and you are ready to do a final check of your project to make sure nothing went wrong in the transfer process.

Remember, your work will not be copied to your roaming profile on Oak, where I can access it, until you log out from the computer you are using. To be safe, you should log out of the first computer and log into another one to be sure the project got saved to your profile on Oak successfully.