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After several months of constant pain in my back, I finally decided to get scans made of my spine. Turns out I have a double lumbar disc hernia (L4-L5 left and L5-S1 right). Luckily they are minor, so there not even talk of needing an operation. For the hernias to go away, I need to rest. I'm supposed to lie flat on my back all the time with my legs folded in an angle. This should reduce the tension in my back and allow it to cure by itself. This position makes it however very difficult - almost impossible - to program while holding a laptop. I searched the web for appropriate laptop stands and stumbled into 'The Lappyvator', a build-it-yourself project that is easy to execute. The only downside seems to me that your arms are in a vertical position and don't rest on anything at all, which is bound to be very tiring. Luckily, I use the AlphaGrip as my keyboard, so I don't need to touch the laptop, eliminating this problem. Now I'm able to work regular hours and totally rest my back. I haven't tried it yet, but it also seems like an awesome approach to watch movies or series in bed with the laptop. Below are the pictures of my own lappyvator. I've built it so that I can easily remove the horizontal feet and take it with my in a suitcase when I travel: at last comfortable computing in hotel rooms! |
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Some of you might know through IRC discussions that I use a weird gamepad-like keyboard: the AlphaGrip. While it took me a while to learn, this device took away most of my RSI and shoulder pains, and it allows me to type while standing.
 The company that created the AlphaGrip was chosen by Yahoo! and Ivanka Trump as one of five finalists (out of over 9,000 entries) in the Yahoo! Ultimate Connection Contest. If they win this, they'll have a good amount of more funds to improve the current keyboard and make it wireless and even better for touch typing by possibly rearranging a couple of keys and creating different sizes of the device so that it fits better in larger or smaller hands. So, if you have a couple of seconds, please vote on Mike Wilner, entry 5, here: http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/ultimateconnection/index.php?... If you're really motivated, vote each day until the 25th, that will help a lot. Thanks for lending a hand! |
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For quite a long time I have been suffering from some form of RSI and have tried out different keyboards to try to alleviate the pain. The past three years I have been able to get by thanks to the TouchStream keyboard from FingerWorks. However, this company doesn't exist anymore and I've heard an increasing amount of reports about TouchStream keyboards that are failing. I know that mine will not last forever either and I'm starting to suffer from the fact that it's still a traditional keyboard with horizontally twisted hands. This is not a natural position and the strain it puts on my wrists is forcing me to take frequent breaks again.
I started looking for a new keyboard and found the AlphaGrips. It combines most of the things that I find important: no need to reach out for the mouse, vertically positioned hands, limited finger movements, and the ability to type while standing up. I've had it for almost three weeks now, and my typing speed is slowly becoming acceptable. Sadly, it's still a keyboard and I still need to move my fingers and position my hands in a certain way. I can already feel another kind of stress building up. Last week I showed my AlphaGrips to Jonas Bonér at TSSJS Europe, and he told me that he also had serious problems with RSI. Recently he started using voice recognition and told me that it worked extremely well. This sounded very interesting, because when I played with voice recognition a few years ago, it really wasn't very useful at all.  When I came home from the conference, I ordered myself a copy of iListen and started training it with the Logitech headset that I've been using for Skype. While it sort of worked, the recognition rate was not good enough for it to be useful. It seems that for voice recognition software to be really precise, you need to have a specialized headset that's optimized for the task. I thus ordered one of the supported headsets, the Plantronics .Audio 85, and it arrived today. Holy Moses! As soon as I started using this headset, the recognition rate really increased up to at least 95 percent! I'm going to try to use voice recognition now for as many tasks as possible. It's great that technology allows geeks to continue to spend an obscene amount of time in front of the computer! 
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A lot of notebook manufacturers are jumping onto the new Intel Core Duo processor. Apple's announcement of the MacBook Pro is no exception and many people seem to have rushed towards the Apple Store to buy one. I admit it, I almost felt bad considering that I just bought a new Acer Ferrari 4005. However, I had no choice since I had to book in some expenses last year. I did weep a moment when I stumbled into the announcement of the Acer Travelmate 8200. This is one seriously amazing machine that beats the new Apple at almost everything ... for the same price (or a lot cheaper in Europe). People that were considering to get the new Intel Apple laptop for multi-boot with Windows should also reconsider. I turns out that it doesn't use the standard PC BIOS, but EFI instead. Only Windows Vista will support EFFI, so your current Windows XP copies are useless. As far as Linux support goes, the Airport Extreme card doesn't work which makes it pretty useless in many settings considering that you can't even dial-up if you don't get an external modem! I'm also much more confident that OpenSolaris will run soon on it since the Acer Ferrari 4005 seems to have been widely adopted inside Sun and the Travelmate 8200 is a logical follow-up. The chassis is even almost the same. Maybe a next revision of the MacBook Pro might tempt me, but currently it's again underpowered (this seems to be a trend in Apple notebooks) and doesn't support anything but MacOSX and only a couple of applications correctly.
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RIFE has been hosting its source repository with Subversion through WebDAV and https. Since RIFE is an open-source project, we have always worked with a self-signed SSL certificate. This however brought up a warning dialogue when people accessed our repository. Many times we got remarks about this and finally decided to look around for a cheap way to procure ourselves a legitimate SSL certificate. After some searching, it turns out that GoDaddy.com is providing free certified SSL certificates to qualifying open-source projects! We got ours in a couple of hours. This is really cool and I'm sure it will benefit many projects. We will now also look into providing signed jars of the RIFE distribution to make it easier to fine-tune a security policy for the framework without having to lower security throughout an entire application server. |
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