I figured I'd jump in and add a few things that worked for me.

Equipment

It should be obvious, but if it's not, the best way to fight an issue with your wrists is to use better equipment. We're talking mouse and keyboard here.

Keyboard

Probably after my 2nd year of programming in my bedroom (as a teen), I started having issues with my wrists. I looked it up on forums, figured out that it was mostly due to the fact that I would sit in front of my computer for 10+ hours at a time, and asked for this keyboard for my birthday that year. Problem solved, right?

Of course not. Fighting RSI is something you'll likely due for your entire career. Eventually, I switched over to the current edition of the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard. It did a lot to get rid of the pain at first, but eventually, I would find that my wrists would start hurting again, especially after extended coding marathons. I would usually blame it on the age of the keyboard and buy a new one every year or so. On those newer Microsoft ergonomic models, the PSI to push down a key increased several orders of magnitude as it ages.

Last year, I switched to the Kinesis Advantage keyboard. The prices from the manufacturer are a bit inflated, check out Amazon.com and you can score one for a bit less. This keyboard is a dream. The PSI is pretty constant, even going into my 2nd year of use. It also has optional foot pedals, but I don't use those. This keyboard is hard to transition to, as the key layout is a bit different. If you are coding every day, it might be a good idea to keep your old keyboard around for a bit while you get used to this one. I believe it took me around 2 weeks to get fully used to this keyboard. It's also very customizable, I use it on a Mac, and it comes with extra keys and a key puller to make it easy to switch layouts.

Since I've switched, I've never even thought about going back. I have literally zero pain in my wrists now, and I'm coding more hours than I have in a long time (being a freelance consultant, that equates to money).

Mouse

I pride myself on never really having to touch the mouse. I do everything possible by shortcut keys, hot keys or macros. I use Vim as my everything editor. For this reason, I don't really care about the mouse I use. I am currently using the Apple Magic Mouse that came with my 27" iMac.

Desk

One of my favorite upgrades I made when changing over to work at home full-time was getting a standing desk. While this doesn't directly change my RSI issues, it does help get me away from the computer more often. When you are standing and are faced with a programming conundrum that you need some time to think about, it's quite easy to just wander away from the keyboard and go take out the trash. That's something I'm sure my wife loves as well.

Breaks

I just mentioned it above, and the original post by Henrik Warne mentions it as well, but taking regular breaks is a great idea. 20 years ago, people weren't sitting in front of a computer, operating it with their fingers the way we are today. It's going to take a few more cycles of evolution before I think we'll adapt. For the moment, the best thing you can do is to do something else every hour or so, for a few minutes at a time.

Hope that helps!

--Steve

• What's In A GIF -- I recently had to implement multi-frame GIFs in PHP and found this byte by byte guide pretty helpful in understanding how GIFs work.

• Parenthood by Jeff Atwood -- Mirrors a lot of my own feelings about being a geek dad.

• Google+ Style Buttons -- A great and thorough set of Google+-like buttons and styles to match, if you're into the Google+ look.

• High Performance PHP Session Storage at Scale -- Great post about using PHP sessions from a memcache layer rather than from disk, because disk doesn't scale well.

• PHP Advent 2011 -- The PHP Advent site is live for 2011, lots of great reads already up, too many to link to them individually.

That's all for now. Hopefully I'll return to my previous blogging schedule after the weekend.

git branch --no-merged

Very useful when trying to clean-up after a long week of developing many features in tandem.

Thus, I put this up on GitHub. He said it was "too slow", and so I refactored it to use imap_sort rather than imap_fetch_overview. This is why sharing code via GitHub is profoundly useful in my eyes, quick feedback and interations.

Hopefully someone finds it useful as well. It still can be a bit slow on large mail boxes, but it's offloading all of the sorting to the IMAP (Google) server now.

You can find the code on GitHub, feel free to fork it and make it faster if you feel the need.

Note: it's required that you have imap extensions installed alongside PHP, and IMAP access turned on in your GMail account

mysql> \e

This will pop open your defined $EDITOR and allow you to edit the command. After editing, save and quit (:wq for you vim users), and just type a semi-colon (;) and hit enter. It will run whatever command you've written into your editor. Voila!

Here's a one liner that I've started using instead.

mysqldump <mysql_options> | gzip -9 > file.sql.gz

Note: the -9 in the gzip command is the compression level, 9 being the maximum compression

In these cases, I generally am at a stopping point. (E.g. I have all my code checked in and pushed). In order to reset my local copy back to what's on the origin server, I do the follwing:

git reset --hard origin/master

Origin being the remote that I want to pull from and master being the branch.

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.

• On software patents, Quoted in John Carmack: Knee Deep in the VooDoo Voodoo Extreme

I've spent the majority of the day (when not coding) looking at Mozilla's Glow visualization (Firefox 4 downloads), and reading about how it works.

Are you an analytics junky as well?

fc allows you to open the last run command in an editor. By default, it will open with the editor set up in $EDITOR (vim for me).

If you have ever had to type a really long command out, and missed something, or wanted to run it for several more files, fc is very useful as it opens in Vim ($EDITOR) and then, upon closing, will run the command again.

This command works on most Linux systems, Unix systems and on Mac OS X. Give it a try.

To remove the MacVim top toolbar, set this in your .vimrc file:

set guioptions-=T

And never have to close that toolbar again.

If you are in the mood for a documentary, you can not go wrong with this film. Go. Watch it.

P.S. It's available on Netflix Instant Streaming as well.

For my own future reference, he is how to use them:

Adding a submodule:

git submodule add user@host:~/path/to/git/repo.git path/to/check/out
git submodule init

This will add and then initialize the repository under your current project. If the path doesn't exist, it will create it.

Updating a submodule:

The following will update the submodules under your current project.

git submodule update

If necessary, you can also go into the directory and perform the usual git tasks, since it is its own repository.

Have fun with git submodules!

The first, open a new terminal and type this:

sudo hostname <new hostname>

Note: You will be asked for your password, because you are performing this command as root

The second, go to System Preferences -> Sharing -> Computer Name.

The first option will be more immediate.