Pushing the envelope

Darren's take on Java, agile methods, cool open source stuff, interesting technologies and other random wanderings through the land of blog.
Updated: 26/01/2003; 11:51:02.
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Apache Jakarta Project
c2.com
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OpenSymphony
XProgramming.com
XP Developer

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Russell Beattie
Eugene Belyaev
Tony Bowden
Mike Cannon-Brookes
Jeff Duska
Paul Hammant
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Brett Morgan
Rickard Öberg
James Strachan
Joe Walnes

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  15 November 2002

Someone's melted my keyboard!

Got a Maltron keyboard on hire for the next few weeks. Its very strange. People also think I am for using it. I've just about gotten used to the fact that all the keys are at different heights and angles, but its all the control keys that are giving me real difficulty. Several times I've gone to hit alt-tab and got ' instead. Most of the non-letter keys are in different positions, and muscle memory is working against me. My mind thinks alt-tab, but my body is doing 'left arm over, thumb back, second finger up' before I can catch it. Its an oddly jarring sensation. I know what I want to do, but my fingers defy me.

Oddest things so far:

  • Return is under the left thumb
  • ...as is backspace
  • ...and tab

Coolest things so far:

  • Opening brackets, braces, angle brackets etc. is done with the left hand, closing them with the right. Appeals to my logical programmer nature.
  • Angle brackets are unshifted, which makes typing markup a lot easier.
  • The shift-lock key (as distinct from caps-lock).
  • ctrl-alt-del are next to each other and can be activated by drumming one hand over them.

11:20:09 AM      comment []

© Copyright 2003 Darren Hobbs