Let me share the research that has kept me pain free for ten years. I am not qualified in this area, these are just the findings of a long term computer programmer (done little but code from 1981 to 2010, and hope to keep it up until The Singularity makes us obsolete) :

• Move your screen(s) up to eye level

• Every time you exercise do neck stretches

• Read a book on back pain and/ or neck pain.These cover common issues that work for many people; Read the many glowing reviews on Amazon

Screen at Eye Level:

This should be common sense. I work looking forward not down. Peering down compresses neck vertebrae – probably not good for extended periods of time. Commons sense says “mix-it-up if you can”, don’t sit in the same position all day. Personally I alternate between a regular sitting workstation, standing workstation, laptop on a box (or whatever’s handy at the time) and casual surfing using an iPad like a book (not looking down at a laptop). Combined with regular exercise and stretching I still spend almost all waking hours in front of a computer. Of course from time to time I become lazy, and stop stretching after running/cycling; the pain starts creeping back. Returning to regular stretching always cured it (so far, touch wood!)

Sitting workstation:

I use an ergonomic Zody Chair using vesa arm mounts. Yes, I have hauled these to client sites. We just moved house and I don’t have a photo handy

Standing Workstation:

These can be cobbled together very cheaply. Skip those expensive stand/sit combo workstations and build another work area in your home office. The following photo shows a $100 Ikea kit. Notice the two mice? I used to have pain in my mouse button fingers. Learning to use a mouse left handed and swapping between them cured that too. Props to Paul Swan for the mouse tip – he’s a total Genius from my undergrad CompSci degree, now working on the Windows Server team.

Laptop on a box:

The title of this post.  Being in my late thirties peers are starting get aches and pains. Many on Facebook complain of sore necks from laptops. If you listen to only one piece of my advice, Put Your Laptop on a Raised Surface when using it. Oh, and and wear sunscreen Notice I use a real keyboard and wireless mouse than can be used in either hand – these cost peanuts compared to a Doctor’s visit. This is a great setup for short term client engagements – they always have something to stand a laptop on.

Can a $10 Book from Amazon really help?

The books I purchased in 2001 were an incredible help. I am not suggesting these as an alternative to a Doctor’s advice, just worth considering if your Doctor has been of no help.

Hopefully this posts allows some to extend their coding careers. Please take this advice as just that, general common sense advice.

So how did OS X work out? Well it’s certainly a good operating system, does most things I need but obviously is not going to run Visual Studio anytime soon. Lack of open source software was a major gripe; 7Zip, KDiif3 and many other great open source projects just don’t exist  for the Mac.

Snow Leopard was a total flop, costing me hours in lost time as it broke our HTPC which was running Hulu and XBMC. Initially Mac fanboys jumped all over  me for criticizing it the day after it was released, but over time the general consensus is that Apple needs public beta testing before releasing an OS upgrade. A few service releases later Snow Leopord works fine but lacks the snappiness of Win7.

Apple hardware is fantastic. Developing on a MacMini is heaven thanks to virtual silence. The tiny form factor helps reconfigure workstations, keep a clearer desk etc. Using a MacMini as a HTPC is a little expensive but totally worth it, low power means low heat and they’ll happily live in a cupboard. New Minis also support two digital monitors, IR remote, bluetooth, latest WiFi, GigaBit internet and have a stack of USB ports. The 13″ MacBook Pro cost $1200, plus the cost of after market 4GB RAM and an Intel SSD. With the SSD and Win7 it’s plenty fast even for a demanding developer. The quality keyboard and touches like back-lit keys, multi-touch trackpad etc make it easily worth the extra cash. Oh and using OS X battery life is nine hours for the latest model – I see over five hours with WiFi and Bluetooth on a 2009 model.

So why the move to Win7? “It just works” scream most Mac users when you ask them “Why a Mac”. True for basic users, but not people like us. Hours can be wasted with simple tasks like trying to format a non Apple external hard-disk. This where the experience breaks down. Problem with Windows are generally solved with a quick Google search. Certainly not the case for OS X, with the hard disk users were berated online for not buying a Apple branded hard disk. I have Bluetooth problems with a Microsoft mouse and have never been able to resolve it other than rebooting. Do you use two monitors? Fine, that works… oh you have one in portrait mode (like I do)? Ain’t gunna happen in OS X yet sorry. HTPC? What you did not buy an Apple TV unit? The Mac Mini work well as a HTPC but does not support font scaling like Win7. I found a hack which works in some cases not other. Of course almost those cool HTPC open source tools don’t exist for the Mac, ironically XBMC is one that does and it’s almost as stable as for Windows.

Conclusion:
Hopefully this posts helps you consider if  OS X is for you. It’s a good OS, but Win7 is so much better in so many ways. If you want something that “just works” for simple tasks I highly recommend an iPad. That device is so simple I bought another for my Parents. They grasped it quickly and are having few problems. Also the design of the iPad apps means it’ll be very hard for bad guys to devise a virus for them. Macs don’t get PC viruses they get Mac viruses, I would wager the iPad will be virtually virus free.

http://www.meetup.com/AtlAltDotNet/  this is great for new ideas and decent technical depth. It is a fairly new group still finding its feet

http://www.iasahome.org/web/atlanta  Atlanta’s IASA chapter – always has super-smart people in attendance. Most meetings end up being a discussion (or argument!) with few punches pulled. The best part? BS artists are shot down very quickly and most never come back

http://www.atldotnet.org this is the ‘main’ .Net User Group in town and excellent at delivering high level introductions to topics. Networking is very good here too as local MVPs etc are at most meetings

Other .Net focused groups are http://www.atlantamspros.com and http://ggmug.com. A good attempt to list all relevant groups is http://www.devcow.com/usergroups but I don’t believe it is currently maintained.

Hopefully that helps a few people looking to learn more and network

One free and simple technique is Boot and Nuke. I download the small ISO and used this free ISO burning tool to burn a CD.

The laptop then booted from the CD into a Linux program which looks similar to below once running. I choose the default and it took about two hours to delete a 70GB 7400 rpm hard disk with a DOD Short (three pass) technique:

Finally another 30 minutes using Averatec’s media recovery discs and it is now ready for someone else to enjoy.

Chrome is built on webkit and has worked fine for me on all my favorite sites so far, interesting tid-bits:

• Task Manger shows each tab is a separate process – for better stability one assumes
• Love my new desktop shortcuts to gmail, hotmail etc
• The new tab option shows screenshots of favorite pages – cool
• Starts-up fast, renders fast
• Username/ passwords were sucked out of Firefix – creepy
• It evilly dropped a shortcut into my quick launch bar, grrr

So it looks like us web-devs will soon have three mainstream browsers to test for All the more reason for everyone to start using JQuery etc.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/How_To_Flash_the_WRT54Gv8

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT54G_v8.0_%26_v8.2

1. Go to http://192.168.1.1 (default user/pass is admin/admin)
2. Click on Administration tab, then click on Firmware Upgrade. Upload vxworkskillerGv8-v3.bin
3. When you see ‘Update is successful, Rebooting….’ unplug the router for 120 seconds (some say to wait 120 secs BEFORE unplugging – do both to be safe)
4. Plug in router, ping 192.168.1.1 to verify it is still alive (you may have to hardcode static IP settings on your PC to have a gateway of 192.168.1.1, subnet 255.255.255.0 and IP 192.168.1.100 )
5. Run the Linksys Tftp Utility, uploading dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin with these settings:
   
6. Press Ugrade. When the upgrade GUI’s green dot appears press the router reset button
7. Browse to 192.168.1.1 and see the new firmware (default user/pass is root/admin)
   

If you are looking to flash another a non v8 router with DD-WRT I found these links to be the most helpful:
DD-WRT Installation wiki
Client Bridge Example (this is almost 100% correct for V24 firmware – you should have no problems following it)

Also be aware there are version specific firmwares on the dd-wrt website, but it may take you while to find them: Linksys is under the Broadcom (chipset) folder. More than likely a newer builder than I linked to will work with the v8, but I simply wanted another client bridge and have had one running with v24 for two months now.

Afraid to do this ‘hack’? Of the three Linksys routers I’ve flashed none became bricks. Heck they are only $40 now anyway, but if you do brick one it looks they are not too impossible to recover:
Recover from a bad-flash (unbrick a dead router) wiki

So Why did I do this?

This was left to last as the news that we can flash Linksys routers is years old. Still even me -a tech blog addict- was still not 100% sure what a wireless bridge is, and how to link to wireless networks into one seamless network. We need access points in many locations, but are renting so cannot run cat5 everywhere. Yes I could buy custom wireless adapters for the xbox (xbmc), HTPC, NAS drives, PCs and printers but they normally cost $80 or more each and are no where nearly as flexible as a DD-WRT flashed router which has 5 ports. Also the new V8 WRT54G router I bought for my theater room was losing the plot when the PS3 was turned on – I have no idea why but the voip phone etc would all lose their connection. Since being flashed it has been 100% stable.

This is a sample wireless bridge, to the machines it looks like one seamless network:

We now have three WRT54 routers with DD-WRT. One is a primary and two more are client bridges.. one for the xbmc and for my main PC in an office room. They seem to play fine together. The two client bridges have five Ethernet sockets as the wan port was reconfigured by DD-WRT. This is fantastic for many reasons, e.g. when moving large files I can plug a laptop or NAS drives into the same wired network. WiFi is fine for streaming media, but you trying moving a 10GB VirtualPC image or 4GB TV recording over WiFi and you’ll see how much faster/ reliable wired networks are.

Be sure to read in List View, this way you can quickly home in on posts that interest you. I have over 100 feeds and Mr. Index Finger was getting pretty tired with the next button, I expected a whopping blister with the video game like rapid fire of next, next, next!

An irksome issue with online based services is they do not work on most planes, trains or automobiles as just like me they lose the plot when an Internet connection is taken away. If you have not heard, Google Gears is a new Google API that hopes to address this. So far Google Reader is the only application I know of to use Google Gears, and it does not support images yet. Interestingly Google Gears was a project conceived in an employees ’20% work on what you like time’. Please, please let someone else’s 20% now be looking at hooking up Gmail and Google Docs and Spreadsheets – these simplified my life albeit with another increased dependence on the Internet.

Sign up here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/arcjournal/

PDFs are there too; I just put all the issues on my thumb drive ready for the next Atlantic flight.

This should be fun a night, I will kick off with a light hearted look at Cruise Control – it is amazing how many projects still do not use Continuous Integration. My plan is take demos and a few slides – knowing the Architect Group the audience will soon be talking more than me

Next I will give a more formal presentation on Software Estimation – it will be a little dry, but I expect people in the room will liven it up with amusing tales from the field. We all have tales to tell of estimates which went awry.

The Architects group is really meant for Architects and CTOs with 10+ years experience. Even are you not an Architect (yet!) come along this month and enjoy these basic topics. Be aware that most regulars will call out any BS from presenters, I fully expect to be challenged and hope to learn a lot from other attendees.

The Atlanta IASA website is http://www.iasahome.org/web/atlanta.
We meet at Matrix in Dunwoody:

May 9 – 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Matrix (on the top floor)
115 Perimeter Center Place NE
Suite 250
Atlanta, GA 30346

Click here for a Google Map

The office is secure so if you are late knock on the window to the left of the door and someone will let you in.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/PaulLockwood

What are the main benefits I see from the site? Luckily I have never have trouble finding contracts, but every so often I find myself working for really bad managers – incompetents seem to cluster, why is that? With LinkedIn I hope to avoid making such mistakes ever again:

LinkedIn should enable us to observe any company’s rate of turnover, especially to discover if competent senior developers are leaving in droves or only staying for a few months. As more and more people joined LinkedIn it will become pretty easy to contact someone who used to have the job you are interviewing for – what better way to get to the 411 on why they left than ask the individual themselves?

One thing I have found is that not every member responds to an invite immediately. After three weeks I sent a reminders to the few stragglers and all but one responded within the day – perhaps they missed the first ‘bulk request’ due to spam filters? Whatever the reason don’t forget than you can easily resend an invitation to an existing member.