[Gllug] RSI: Was VACANCY: Site Reliability Engineering

[Nix]

On 28 Feb 2009, Tim Porter stated:

> Yeah the shape of the whole keyboard is something that I think would
> make a difference, unfortunately at least on my laptop, that's a bit
> tricky.

Yeah, RSI pretty much rules out using laptops / netbooks on the move for
anything involving much typing. Bendy keyboards just don't work with
non-bendy screens.

I suspect we'll have to wait until they get roll-up screens :)

> At the end of the day, its less distance to move your fingers around,
> the middle row on my keyboard reads "AOEUIDHTNS" and I'm informed there
> are about 50k words that can be written with just that. I can't say I've

What matters isn't the raw number of words you can write with it: it's
whether *common* words can be written with it. Word frequencies in
natural language text follow a power law, so if you can write the most
common ones without moving away it'll make a huge difference; if you can
write 50k really uncommon ones but only 1/10th of the common ones,
that's almost worthless.

The Maltron home row reads ANISF DTHOR.

Let's look at the top hundred words in the Oxford English Corpus,
constituting 50% of all the words in the Corpus (by count):

"the be to of and a in that have I it for not on with he as you do at
this but his by from they we say her she or an will my one all would
there their what so up out if about who get which go me when make can
like time no just him know take people into year your good some could
them see other than then now look only come its over think also back
after use two how our work first well way even new want because any
these give day most us".

Of these, Dvorak users can type 30 without leaving the home row; Maltron
users can type 26; QWERTY users can type a pathetic 4. So far so bad for
Maltron, until you realise that they pulled a neat trick. The commonest
letter of all, E, isn't on the home row... because it's on the largest
key on the keyboard, directly under your left thumb, on what is an enter
key in QWERTY mode. With *that* included as an honorary 'home row'
member, Maltron users can type 37.

(For RSI reduction there are other important measures to optimize for,
such as reducing the number of hops across multiple letters that the
fingers must do. For that, the positions of letters on other rows
matters, too.)

> The Maltron is something I will do some further research on. Thanks for
> the tip :)

Biggest downside: it *costs*. You really learn not to spill things on the
keyboard after spending 500 quid on one.

> To anyone reading this who doesn't take the whole typing style/posture
> thing too seriously, please, have a think about what you're doing.

When the pain starts, they'll learn. I used to scoff, once: it would 
never happen to me! Then it did.
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