Coding in the cloud

I have found myself using a number of different computers both on the move and at home. This is a pain. The Chrome browser has helped me bring together bookmarks and browsing history across my devices - it has worked flawlessly so far - except on a 7 inch tablet where the tabs are a little too small and the keyboard too large. But what I have wanted for a little while now is a development environment that can be accessed from any machine and anywhere.

There are of course the hosted full blooded virtual instances in Amazons and Microsoft's cloud. So far the MS Azure instances look to be the easiest to use. Remote desktop access may be blocked from certain locations. Another gotch with Azure is that if you select an Azure VM with a paid for product such as Oracle then your account will be blocked the next day and you will have to drop out of the free trail period to continue. AWS looks a little more complex to set up. Watch this space. There are web based coding environments such the Koding web based IDE using Python. See this earlier post. But these are only point solutions.

I spent some time selecting the 'best' Chromebook for me to use as a portable machine, I can not afford a MacBook Air, and small and light Windows machines are either too expensive or not worth the bother. I eventually settled on a Acer C720 I am very happy with this purchase. It is almost perfect for use on the train. The network teathering to a phone works well. So far EE have proved to provided better and faster coverage than giffgaff (O2) on the great western mainline out of Reading.
Next I'll look at the ssh client and Crouton.