Cal HendersonInterview
Web developer, professional asshat
Adapted from Cal Henderson's interview on Uses This, published 26 November 2009. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
I have a Mac Pro w/ dual 3GHz quad cores, 16GB of RAM and a tasty 1TB of storage in hardware RAID 10.
I think perhaps that the wireless keyboard is the best thing Apple have ever made.
I have a pair of 30" widescreen Dell flatpanels, which are much cheaper than the apple ones and are just as good.
I have a really nice sounding pair of Bose Companion 5's, but they don't work well with OSX - they cut out when switching apps and need unplugging and replugging - gah.
I use a Microsoft optical mouse - super cheap and works great.
I have the same mouse on my PC, an HP Elitebook with some number of fancy processors and 3GB of RAM.
I use a pair of Dell 20" flat panels.
The keyboard I'm typing on now is a $15 Microsoft one, which like all my keyboards has the caps-lock key removed - I welcome the day when that gets phased out.
For a while I was resting it on wooden building blocks and pointing a floor fan at it, but I've recently got an Antec cooling pad that seems to work fine, once you cover the crazy-bright LED with electrical tape.
I have an iPhone with me at all times, so that's not a huge issue, but travelling with it sucks.
Both of my machines sit on a pair of Ikea Jerker desks, the best cheap computer desks ever made.
For music on my PC, I have a pair of Sony MDR-7506 headphones that are comfortable enough to wear all day without getting squished ears.
Communication
I used Outlook Express for a really long time, but Thunderbird has gotten a lot better at IMAP lately.
I used Trillian for a few years, but it became more and more bloated.
Productivity
If most people are using Quicksilver then I think that pretty much points to a badly designed OS.
Browser
Notes
My most used application is probably noted, a text editor I wrote in 2001.
Coding & Development
One of the best pieces of software in a web developer's toolbox is phpMyAdmin, which no LAMP developer should be without.
Design
I use Paint Shop Pro 5 from 1998 for working with graphics - it is still the best program ever made for dealing with images at the pixel level and converting between formats.
Media
My name is Cal Henderson and I worked at Flickr for over 5 years as the head of engineering.
Storage
SyncToy keeps my mirrored disks in sync.
Other
I intended to bootcamp Windows onto it, but Boot Camp doesn't support Apple's own hardware RAID card.
The trick to playing some games at a reasonable speed on a crappy PC laptop is to have a fast external disk - it does wonders for World of Warcraft.
On my PC I run Windows XP Professional; Vista is a bit too high-tech for me.