Uses This

Who are you, and what do you do?

James Gosling, software engineer. Best known as the originator of the Java programming language.

What hardware do you use?

I've got stacks of hardware in my home office. A fact which my wife is constantly cranky about.

For everyday stuff and while traveling, I use a MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of ram and a 256 GB SSD disk.

I've got a Mac Mini in one corner that's just used for household stuff: taxes, the checkbook, and the home automation system. It's my "don't fuck with that" machine that I generally leave alone.

In the closet I've got a home-built system that I use for network storage. It runs OpenSolaris and has 5 2Tb drives: mirrored with a hot spare for a total of 4Tb of usable storage.

An Acer netbook running Ubuntu when I want to travel light.

A couple of old Sun boxes that I keep meaning to rebuild into PCs - they've got interesting cases.

A beefy Sony laptop running Ubuntu for doing Linux hacking.

A big Mac Pro with 8 cores@3GHz and 8 gigs and a 30" Apple screen and a 22"(?) old Sun screen. It's got a Wacom tablet and a 3Dconnexion mouse. This machine is mostly used for doing graphics.

3 Kindles.

1 iPad. I had to give it a try - it mostly lives in the bathroom and has replaced the magazine stack.

For camera gear my main camera is a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. I mostly use my EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM and EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lenses. I also have an Olympus STYLUS TOUGH-6020 for snorkeling and other situations where getting submerged is likely (canoeing).

Gigabit ethernet to everything and every room in the house. Instead of using up precious wallsockets for phone, I use VoIP to a wireless phone. 6Mb DSL into the house from Sonic.net.

The home automation system is a pile of INSTEON switches spread all over the house, controlled by Indigo running on the Mac Mini.

Lots of other, less used, miscellaneous stuff stacked everywhere.

A Mac Mini for my wife and an iMac for my youngest daughter (the older one is out of college).

And what software?

For software, I'm all over the map:

I do most of my programming in NetBeans, although I use vi a fair amount.

I've got copies of OpenOffice, Pages, Keynote and Numbers, but I hardly ever use them.

For doing presentations, I don't use any of the usual software: I wrote my own years ago. I keep using it because I like its workflow better than PowerPoint or Keynote.

My main graphics tool (the thing that I use for things like creating all the JavaOne t-shirts) is NewTek LightWave. It is a phenomenal tool. I've been using it for years.

I also use Photoshop a fair amount and Illustrator occasionally.

I use Aperture to organize photographs.

What would be your dream setup?

I'm pretty happy with my setup. I'd love a renderfarm to speed up Lightwave: global illumination at high resolution in a forest with rain and water sucks up compute power insanely. But I probably wouldn't want to pay the power bill.