Working from Home

If you're anything like me you probably like working from home. This section is provided to give you some tips for working at home effectively. All of your assignments and the software you'll be using will be as platform independent as possible, so working on a system other than CDF shouldn't be too much trouble.

Probably the most useful tool (really a set of tools) for working away from CDF is Cygwin. Cygwin is basically an entire UNIX environment that you can install and run on any Windows PC. If you already have Linux on your home computer you probably don't need Cygwin. Cygwin comes equipped with almost all standard UNIX utilities, most notably:

• ssh - secure alternative to telnet'ing to CDF over the Internet
• gcc - works the same as on CDF
• man - Cygwin has a pretty complete set of man pages
• tons of others...

There is also a port of XFree86 for Cygwin that allows you to run X-clients on CDF and display them on your home PC. You can even start an XDMCP session with CDF so you'll see your entire desktop displayed on your home computer! . Finally, the best feature of Cygwin is that it's 100% free!

Here's a screen shot of an XDMCP session with CDF from XFree86 on my home PC (click on image to see full size)

The CDF admins also provide a Working from Home page that you may find useful.

All the other tools we'll be using have Windows versions as well. Apache works very similar on Windows, and the XML parsers we're using are written in Java so you'll be able to run them once you've downloaded and installed the JDK.

The most important point about working on your home computer is that you must test your code on CDF before submitting. Even if you're using Cygwin or Linux and can reproduce a CDF-like environment there will still be differences! Leave yourself ample time to work out incompatibilities before you submit.