Codestre.am: streaming your code to the masses | Hacker News Reader

Codestre.am: streaming your code to the masses

codestre.am

149 pointsjamesjyu38 comments

Here is a quick-and-hackish way to stream / broadcast your terminal (http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6788/):

    script -qf | tee >(nc -l -p 5000) >(nc -l -p 5001) >(nc -l -p 5002)

The client can then run `nc your_ip port` to watch your terminal live.

Also, I once wrote a node.js script that broadcasts recorded terminal sessions. To see a demo:

    nc wei23.net 5000

Code is on Github: https://github.com/clvv/scriptbroadcast

Definitely hackish, but still useful. Thanks for sharing!

Netcat continually astounds me. The amount of functionality that that little tool provides is just short of incredible.

It's actually not so much netcat, but the Unix system that has such flexibility.

Really amazing, I haven't seen something this interesting on Hacker News in a long time. Pair programming and mentorship are only a couple of low-hanging fruits this could be used for. Awesome to see socket.io at work and kudos to the team at LearnBoost.

Have been hoping for someone to do this for so long - kind of like casting Star Craft, but codecasting instead. Rock on!

I'm enjoying it. One thought I have is, maybe time compression tools for playback. The pressure to keep interesting makes it harder to work.

Definitely. I guess this became obvious as people started using it, but I'll add this really soon.

Well, 'masses' might be overstating the market of people willing to sit through streaming terminal sessions.

Yeah. I think this might be interesting for tutelage and education, though. It makes live-programming more viable for long-distance learning and helps globalize programming.

Something like "Code Streaming for Mere Mortals", or "Code Streaming Made Simple" might seem like a less peculiar choice of words. I just envision the reactions of horror should the masses subversively be exposed to streaming code.

They'll think their computer is getting hacked, yeah. Don't want to be on the other end of that support call.

I really like the design of the site. Clean, minimal, but still unique with lots of personality.

In case you're curious, yes, codestre.am even passes the inception test: http://codestre.am/s

I like it a lot. Very polished (although the server is getting a bit hammered right now).

The only thing missing seems to be 256-color support.

This is great. Pair programming quickly and easily over the web isn't exactly trivial right now. Good job.

Since node is still a little finicky, some installation hints:

- Be sure to have latest node version (0.6.14).

- Don't use -g, just 'node install codestream' instead (-g requires root and should not be used)

- The binary will then be in ~/.npm/codestream/0.1.0/package/bin/codestream - just symlink that to somewhere convenient[1]

- If you get an error try: npm install pty.js (pty.js was a missing dependency for me)

[1] The npm-dev is sadly not very unix-savvy, hence these extra-hoops

I just pushed a new version that should sort out the dependency problems (0.1.1)

Looking forward to this. Registration doesn't seem to work yet.

Please add 'monospace' to the font-family declaration. The site looks terrible in Ubuntu.

'monospace' fallback added. Thanks!

This is so cool. I only wish the screen were a little bigger and could show all the colors.

Very cool. Crashes in Chrome 19.0.1084.1 dev on OSX Lion after a few minutes though.

This reminds me of when the creator of minecraft was streaming a coding session via Justin.tv while he was pumping out a game for a contest.

Also, there is Playterm [1], which does the same thing for shell recordings made with the 'script' command. 'script' and the player 'scriptreplay' are shipping with most modern distributions, e.g. they come in the package bsdutils on Ubuntu.

[1] http://www.playterm.org

Actually they use ttyrec. And also you should always remember size of your terminal and fit it to one of two allowed sizes. http://shelr.tv/ automatically saves term size and allows records with free dimensions.

They must be really being hit hard, my connections keep timing out. :(

Installation instructions for shelr: http://shelr.tv/records/4f7adf9ae9f6190001000001 :)

Just signed up, tried to create a new stream and there was no text box under "Topics". I clicked "Next" anyway and got a "Forbidden" page. Clicked back, reloaded, there was a text box there, and I was able to create a stream.

I see that I have to install node and your package, but I don't want to. I would prefer just to upload a script(1) file, since it may have been captured on a remote system at another time, or I may want to edit it to remove sensitive information. I don't know what your node script is going to send, so I'm not going to run it while I'm connected to a live system.

Also. Take a look at http://shelr.tv/

Very cool. I can see me using it for all things I need to remember in the future..

No nonsense asciicasting for serious hackers: http://ascii.io/

This looks brilliant. Nicely done!

It needs some UI tweaks, but recorder works fine. Great idea!

Nice. gonna show some git tricks to my colleagues using it :-)

Yes, crashes Chrome, and on top of it - signups don't really work. Very unexpected low quality from LearnBoost!

Keep downvoting, but this won't change the fact that LearnBoost released something that was not ready for prime time. Also learn to read carefully before downvoting as the key word is "unexpected", i.e. I obviously like LearnBoost.

You're getting downvotes because you're complaining about an innovative, cool thing on hacker news that couldn't deal with the traffic. Just try it later.

Edit: I didn't downvote your comment.

I am pretty used to many sites not being able to sustain the HN traffic and I never commented on those, but my main point was that I did not expect a service from LearnBoost to be like that as I respect those guys.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com