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Staying in shape as a programmer can be difficult, but recent studies have shown that even if you’re among those in our profession who do work out regularly, sitting for long periods of time at work is detrimental to your health. To be a bit more dramatic about it, sitting is killing you (see Phil Haack’s blog post on this from last year). So, how can we combat this risk while continuing to get our work done (and, if you’re like me, keep on doing the thing you love)? How do you balance coding and keeping in shape?
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It would be nice to "Sleep while working". Not found a pill for that yet 
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I've been thinking about getting a height adjustable desk for home use on and off for about a year. I'm tall and long legged, so after buying myself a chair that adjusted higher than standard and having the ergonomics people rebuild my desk at work to a 34(?)" height (about the only thing cube style furniture is good for) I've found myself wanting a higher desk for home use.
Unfortunately, standard flatpack furniture appears to only be available in 29-31" heights and while I haven't gone to anyone offering custom built furniture for a quote I know it won't be cheap; which has me wondering about just getting an adjustable desk instead. The catch is that I really like the corner desks I have both at work and at home because they let me angle multiple screens so I can easily look at any of them and still have space on each side to put other stuff.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I started experimenting with a standing desk a little over 2 years ago.
The first attempt was to raise up all of my equipment to an appropriate standing height. It was meant to be temporary and experimental, so I simply used boxes, book and boards already around the house. I simply wanted to see what it felt like and get an idea of appropriate keyboard and monitor height in case I wanted to make permanent changes.
Pros: The change of posture was positive, and I found standing helped me focus on the work at hand. When I needed to stop and think, or got frustrated, I could step away, pace, reach for a reference book more easily. My day self-organized into getting a task done, then stepping away, then stepping back to get a task done.
Cons: This setup was all or nothing. Going directly from sitting all the time to standing all the time was physically difficult, tiring and even painful. I still do not like standing all day, and I find some tasks - research, reading - I focus on better when sitting.
That experiment lasted a few months. We moved, and for my new home office I bought a height-adjustable desk (specifically, a GeekDesk[^]).
Pros: Within its range, adjustable to any height you like at the touch of a button, so instantly flexible for whatever work you need to do. Getting under the desk for cable or equipment management is super easy. (Seems dumb until you have to crawl under your desk to plug something in. Raising the whole thing up seems brilliant.)
Cons: Expensive. And now it's your responsibility to set it at standing height. Like the treadmill that turns into a laundry rack, it's easy to get back into the habit of leaving it down at sitting all the time (as I am right now).
As with any exercise, making it a habit is the hardest part, but also the most effective strategy.
I still like the GeekDesk a lot and recommend one if it fits your budget or someone else is paying. If I had it to do over again, I'd probably invest in a tall draftsman's chair first, set up a dedicated standing desk, then standing becomes the default, but I can still sit. Small outlay. Almost the same flexibility.
If you use a laptop, then of course you can simply move to a different location to sit down. Again, the dedicated standing desk works for you, though not if you like to use big desktop monitors.
Good shoes are important for extended standing. Since I work at home, changing between house shoes with good sole support like Birkenstocks, regular shoes, and stocking feet makes for a nice variation.
Going back to the "painful" remark, my experience suggests that going from all sitting to all standing is going to be about as fun as going from all sitting to running a marathon. Start slow and build up to a comfortable routine. Overall, when I actually use the standing desk, I find it beneficial for both my body and my focus on work.
I know a few people who walk or bike while working, but this doesn't interest me at all. It seems distracting, the setup seems inflexible, and I'd much rather work hard, take a break, go out for a walk and clear my head, then come back refreshed for more work. YMMV.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Again, the dedicated standing desk works for you, though not if you like to use big desktop monitors.
My home desktop runs at 4960x1600[^] (that's 2x20" 1x30" monitors); so big monitor space support is an absolute requirement for me.
Terrence Dorsey wrote: oing back to the "painful" remark, my experience suggests that going from all sitting to all standing is going to be about as fun as going from all sitting to running a marathon. Start slow and build up to a comfortable routine.
Being able to switch gradually, or pretend I will anyway, is a part of why I'm interested in an adjustable desk (the height problem with flatpack products being the other). Also because I have a small apartment I don't have room for two desks even if I was willing to drop several grand on a second set of monitors for the second.
Terrence Dorsey wrote: I know a few people who walk or bike while working, but this doesn't interest me at all. It seems distracting, the setup seems inflexible, and I'd much rather work hard, take a break, go out for a walk and clear my head, then come back refreshed for more work. YMMV.
I've no real idea how, or if, this would work out for me. Having to spend $$lot$ separately for a treadmill would give major encouragement to my inner procrastinator and cheapskates. OTOH the only exercise program I've ever managed to stick to for a usefully long period of time has been going for long walks around the neighborhood during the daylight months. However between worse than useless levels of street lighting (kills my night vision while not providing enough illumination for safety) and the accumulation of alternately snow or salt/sand on the sidewalks I'm forced to stop every winter and end up gaining back the inch I walked off my waist during the summer and then face the *ugh* I'm so out of shape problem around now when I try to restart. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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One more question; what does all the up/down movement to for cable management? I'd probably keep my tower on the floor; so I'd have wires for 3 monitors (power and video), 5 channel speakers, and a powered USB hub running from the desktop to the PC and UPSes at a bare minimum. Depending on if I get a side table or not I'd potentially also have wires for a printer, cable modem, router, network switch, and a battery charger adding to the snarl (and I can't escape the feeling I'm forgetting something else).
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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To minimize clutter, I mounted a 9-plug power strip and gigabit ethernet switch to the underside of the desk. This minimizes the cables running from desktop to floor.
I have a tower on the floor (second one soon, maybe) and a Mac Mini on the desk, plus two monitors, KVM, two lamps and various peripherals.
With all that, I have only 4 cords going floor to desk: power strip, KVM to tower, ethernet to wall and ethernet to tower.
Cable management is actually easier because I can raise the desk up and get under there better to plug things in and keep things tidy (not that I always do). If you plug in the floor-to-desktop wires with the desk at full height, you know they'll always be long enough.
There are only two tricks: making sure cables don't snag on the way up, and making sure you don't leave something under the table that hangs it up on the way down. Double-sided velcro straps are good for cable management. Go slow down and back up the first time you've hooked things up, sort out any trouble that reveals itself and you should be good to go.
Standing at the desk right now, thanks to the reminder of this thread. I should write a blog post about my experience, with photos, so everyone can see. On the to do list for the week.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: I mounted a 9-plug power strip and gigabit ethernet switch to the underside of the desk.
I'd still end up with a power mess. My current setup has the tower and monitors on different (large) UPSes and some odds and ends on surge only; and I really need to get a 3rd underneath again to keep my core networking separate from my desktop power pig. (And then there's still desktop #2 and my file server setup behind my chair and on a separate UPS; but neither of these would end up on my desk either so they don't really count for this discussion. My landlord's going to get a rude surprise whenever I move out and his heating bill suddenly jumps because his new tenant ends up needing the furnace more than the few days a year max I've had it on the last few. (Not sure if I turned my heat on beyond a fall test this year at all.)  )
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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After spending about 15 or 20 minutes standing in front of a medium bookshelf with a laptop on the top and using a few books as variable height shims it seems I'd need it all the way up to the 49" limit barefoot; to turn it into a walking desk I'd need to put it up on blocks.
*grumble* I'm only 6'2"; so much for a company selling premium adjustable ergonomic products stepping outside of the one size fits most bracket.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Interesting. I'm also 6' 2" and don't have any problem, though I can see the added height to accommodate a treadmill might complicate things.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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I measured my setup in the standing position.
The desktop is 44-45" inches high, a good level for relaxed typing.
My monitors are raised up on homemade stands so the tops of the monitors are just above eye level. Actual height of the stands depends on the adjustability of the monitors, but they're set up so the bottom edge is about a foot from the table surface. I find this a comfortable setup.
It took a bit of experimentation to arrive at this setup.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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I guess your arms must be a bit longer than mine then (or my total length is disproportionately in my huge hands). Screen height I figured would require something beyond the OEM stands; so I just angled it as best I could while looking down. I came up with the 48-49" height by adjusting the height of my laptop keyboard so that my forearms were parallel to the floor for proper typing posture.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I'd promise this'd be the last question; but I'd just jinx myself...
Are the surfaces the same paper with pretensions of adequacy common in flatpacks or something more durable?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I'm sure it's some sort of plastic veneer on MDF, but it seems to be a high quality plastic veneer, with a very convincing woodgrain effect, on a sturdy, high quality MDF substrate. I'm very pleased with it.
The base is substantial steel construction. For the price, it's a well built desk. This is far beyond anything you'll find in Ikea.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Is it noisy when the height is being adjusted? I am requesting a desk right now and I want to be sure I won't be annoying my coworkers every time I decide to stand up/sit down.
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Nevermind, the guy in the health/safety department at my company showed me a sample setup with an electronically height-adjustable desk. I'm sure my coworkers will be more annoyed with me eating apples. 
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I'd compare it to an electric pencil sharpener, but at a slightly lower pitch.
Your usage might be different, but I've found that I typically only adjust once or twice a day. I start out sitting, raise it during the middle of the day, and put it back down in the afternoon. Anything more than that starts to feel like noodling with the desk instead of working.
IIRC, Joel Spolsky's company has these as standard issue for all employees, and I'm pretty sure you can find more about the practical aspects of using them from one of his blog posts. In fact, there was a classic prank (video now deleted it seems) where they wired a remote control for one of the desks and told a new employee it was voice controlled. The prank went on forever and looked totally real. Pure genius.
Anyway, here's some video of the desk in action[^]. I have the standard 78" model and you could easily put three 27" monitors side-by-side on it.
Guess it's time for me to dig out the photos and document this setup.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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The size of Linux's waistline has long been the focus of recurring attention here in the Linux blogosphere, even drawing occasional criticism from Linus Torvalds himself. Recently, however, a fresh weight-related complaint was made -- not about the kernel itself, but about today's Linux distros. "Linux fatware? These distros need to slim down" was the title of the InfoWorld piece that got the conversational ball rolling, and it's sparked quite a lively discourse. The nice thing about Linux distros: there's a flavor to suit just about anyone.
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The PlayStation 4 is due out this fall, and its technical specifications have been largely under wraps -- till now. While the company gave a presentation at GDC, the system's lead architect, Mark Cerny, hasn't talked publicly in any great depth about the platform since its unveiling this February.... What follows is a total breakdown of the hardware from a developer's perspective: the chips on the board, and what they're capable of. Replacing CELL with a much more straightforward architecture for developers.
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IIS7 was revolutionary in opening the IIS web server platform for public extensibility. Prior to that, few software vendors wrote extensions for IIS, using the native ISAPI Filter and Extension APIs. IIS7 completely changed this, creating a public extensibility model on top of which the web server itself was implemented, and opening it for managed development via the familiar ASP.NET API. Here are a couple things you can do only with native modules, and why you will probably never have to do them. In the beginning, there was ISAPI and it was... well, let's move along....
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Compiler warnings are one of the most helpful tools for developers. The compiler can not only warn you about obvious mistakes (such as a method you forgot to implement); it also identifies many code patterns that, though syntactically correct, are potentially dangerous (like signed/unsigned conversion) or just plain wrong (such as mismatched format specifiers in a format string). Both the Clang compiler frontend and Apple’s default Xcode project templates have a default set of warnings enabled, designed to warn you about many probable errors in your code but not annoy you with tons of false positives.... They are not the best choice for new projects, though. Instead, you should strive to switch on as many warnings as possible. Which warnings should you enable? All of them, most of the time.
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It gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling to know that if I ever accidentally slip into using Objective-C I will be warned, comprehensively, repeatedly and necessarily.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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Here's my review after having Google Glass for two weeks: 1. I will never live a day of my life from now on without it (or a competitor). It's that significant. 2. The success of this totally depends on price.... This is the most interesting new product since the iPhone and I don't say that lightly. At what price does Google Glass become interesting to you?
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Let's say the rumors are true, and that Microsoft does in fact bring back the Start button and a boot-to-desktop option to address longstanding user complaints. Can that fix what's ailing Windows 8? Perhaps, eventually — but Microsoft is still treating the symptom rather than the disease. The problem is the PC itself, not the operating system that runs it. And that's what Microsoft (and, secondarily, its Wintel partner Intel) really needs to transform. The PC is not dying. It's just becoming a niche product with niche needs.
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I totally disagree that the PC is dying. We're simply no longer using it for things that it's not that great at, such as lounging on the couch and reading the news, watching a video or chatting to friends.
Many things we used to do on PCs we now do on our phone or tablet. This doesn't mean that all those things we still need a PC for are disappearing too. Anything involving lots of typing (writing, programming, editing), anything requiring large screens (developing, writing, graphics), and anything that requires serious power still need a desktop. Granted, more and more can move to a tablet, but there's one fundamental piece missing with tablets: the PC. As a central place to sync and to organise your devices (especially in the Mac world) you still need a PC. As a place to store your music and movies you still need a PC unless you have small collections or unlimited gigabit internet connection.
My view is that Microsoft are trying to make the PC into a tablet experience which is a dumb, dumb, dumb thing to do. Make the OS suit the device, so on tablets and convertibles have the Metro UI. On desktops have the Desktop UI.
Further, stop making Windows complicated, especially if the feeling is the Desktop phase is coming to an end. Embrace what people really want, which is a super simple OS for organising files and running applications. Make the PC for the office super streamlined, easy to deploy, low maintenance and secure. Make the PC for the home a true hub. Make it be the thing you please next to your amplifier and serves your media, or as an all-in-one with a bluetooth keyboard that sits in the kitchen or living room and lets you organise yourself really easily, including allowing you to type and handle stuff like files and devices. This isn't a tablet's role.
Let tablets and phones be tablets and phones. Let the desktop be a desktop and be tuned for those tasks. Most importantly, make the OS (not necessarily the UI) consistent. In Metro you still have to drop back to Desktop sometimes. In desktop, on a touch device, you are still presented with XP-era dialogs.
Further, make the apps you offer decent. The out-of-the-box selection in Win8 are anything but showcase apps. They are a let down to users.
I personally wish they had not introduced Metro on desktops at all. Completely hide it. Then, on tablets ensure that Metro works really well and that all the Desktop stuff doesn't leak (no XP style dialogs). Then, ditch Windows Phone 8 and use the tablet OS on phones. You then have one underlying OS with 3 UIs: desktop, tablet and phone. Elements and branding will be shared, it will be comfortable switching between, and it will all make sense and be simplified.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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