Perhaps something more programmable would be better? I know that I wouldn't use most of the multimedia keys, but I have lots of other keys that would come in handy.
A solution that might work, if it wasn't too delicate, would be a keyboard with additional keys that could be mapped to keystroke combinations or commands to the OS. And the keys themselves could have small LCD panels that an icon could be loaded into.
I recently polled my friends to recommend some books I should read, all genres welcome, because I felt that my reading habits were getting a bit stale. I was a little surprised to get three SF&F recommendations, but I'm reasonably pleased with them :
I'm about 150 pages into China Mievelle's Perdido Street Station, and I'm enjoying it immensely. Imaginative and odd, magic and steampunk crammed together.
Connie Willis' To Say Nothing Of The Dog is just straight out funny... Victorian Comedy of Manners meets Time Travel.
Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths was oversold to me, I think. I thought it was just okay. The ideas were good, the execution was mediocre.
Somewhat off-topic, the other books that were recommended were Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and Stewart Brand's How Building's Learn.
The latter was the real score, as far as I'm concerned. Fantastically written, incredibly absorbing, it's a book I think everybody should read. It's about architecture, how buildings are used and changed over their lives, and how the two interact. I believe that the metaphors he uses could be extended to software/systems architecture as well... or at least I've tried to do so to get a new perspective.
If you're coding in Java, you might want to look into Log4J. You can assign priority levels to logging tasks (ie; "log this at debug priority") and then set via a configuration file what priorities for what classes will be logged.It isn't quite as low cost as no logging method calls at all, but it's impressively fast... the Log4J intro page says...
On an AMD Duron clocked at 800Mhz running JDK 1.3.1, it costs about 5 nanoseconds to determine if a logging statement should be logged or not.
Given the general performance requirements (in terms of perceived user response time) of web applications, this is easily tolerable.
What's especially nice is that you can create a logging standard for all your classes. Log at the start and end of every method, log the constructor at the info priority. Log every error at the error priority. When it's time to switch to production, just modify a config file, and your logging switches from high levels of logging to only logging errors. To diagnose problems, just turn up the logging level for that class via the config file, and you get the level of logging you need.
I've been using Log4J for some time now, and I have to say that it's one of the most impressive things to come out of the Jakarta project... and that's saying a lot.
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A solution that might work, if it wasn't too delicate, would be a keyboard with additional keys that could be mapped to keystroke combinations or commands to the OS. And the keys themselves could have small LCD panels that an icon could be loaded into.
I'm about 150 pages into China Mievelle's Perdido Street Station, and I'm enjoying it immensely. Imaginative and odd, magic and steampunk crammed together.
Connie Willis' To Say Nothing Of The Dog is just straight out funny ... Victorian Comedy of Manners meets Time Travel.
Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths was oversold to me, I think. I thought it was just okay. The ideas were good, the execution was mediocre.
Somewhat off-topic, the other books that were recommended were Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and Stewart Brand's How Building's Learn.
The latter was the real score, as far as I'm concerned. Fantastically written, incredibly absorbing, it's a book I think everybody should read. It's about architecture, how buildings are used and changed over their lives, and how the two interact. I believe that the metaphors he uses could be extended to software/systems architecture as well ... or at least I've tried to do so to get a new perspective.
If you're coding in Java, you might want to look into Log4J. You can assign priority levels to logging tasks (ie; "log this at debug priority") and then set via a configuration file what priorities for what classes will be logged.It isn't quite as low cost as no logging method calls at all, but it's impressively fast ... the Log4J intro page says ...
Given the general performance requirements (in terms of perceived user response time) of web applications, this is easily tolerable.
What's especially nice is that you can create a logging standard for all your classes. Log at the start and end of every method, log the constructor at the info priority. Log every error at the error priority. When it's time to switch to production, just modify a config file, and your logging switches from high levels of logging to only logging errors. To diagnose problems, just turn up the logging level for that class via the config file, and you get the level of logging you need.
I've been using Log4J for some time now, and I have to say that it's one of the most impressive things to come out of the Jakarta project ... and that's saying a lot.