Matthew MckeonInterview
Developer (IBM Visual Communication Lab)
Adapted from Matthew Mckeon's interview on Uses This, published 15 September 2010. 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
My primary work machine is a MacBook Pro 2.4Ghz/4GB RAM/180GB HDD with a matte screen.
A Thinkpad T40 that has expired and been resurrected several times, and now has a dead video card.
A 12" 867Mhz Powerbook G4 that has immeasurable sentimental value.
My (currently 1-year-old) daughter and I play with an XO1 from One Laptop Per Child - she loves the keyboard and the camera as well as the Tam-Tam music apps.
Communication
Productivity
With tabular data I sometimes open something first in Excel to get a sense of the dimensions and categories, then drop into code to actually do any transformations I need.
Browser
Notes
My browser homepage is set to a local Tiddlywiki instance where I keep all my notes.
Coding & Development
If it's a big dataset I'll sometimes pull it into SQLite and explore it by slicing and summarizing.
I like Eclipse too, but IDEA's refactoring support is a better fit for the way I program.
Design
Media
When I'm experimenting with color I really like an obscure Flash toy by voet cranf called color synthAxis - it lets you play with swatches of color easily and do some basic transformations.
Storage
At the office I have a basic desk setup: a 22" LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse and a 1TB drive for Time Machine, plus a USB hub to tie everything into a single plug.
I use Time Machine and IBM's centralized backup servers to back up my work machines; at home I use Carbonite.
Other
Sometimes I'll start with ColorBrewer to explore perceptually robust schemes, then adapt them to what I want.
Recently I've been experimenting with Processing.js as a platform.