Geoff Goodell has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard and is working currently on the Open Net Initiative (opennet.net), which studies internet censorship. Recently I found myself sitting next to Geoff, who was typing casually at a furious speed on his Thinkpad, while looking at a black screen divided into four quadrants, each apparently operating in command-line mode with colored type far too small for my old eyes to read, but obviously quite legible to Geoff. Since it was too hard for me to eaveswatch, even at close range, I asked him if he was a emacs or a vi guy. He smiled and replied, "vi".

So I asked him to let the rest of us know the rest of what he used, and here's his reply:

I use a constellation of machines running Debian Linux. I store most of my working files (e.g., research, code, papers, personal web pages) in AFS, which allows me to seamlessly share data across machines. For authentication, I use a combination of MIT Kerberos and OpenSSH public keys. I exchange multimedia files using rsync, and I use MPlayer for audio, video, and streaming.

For hardware, I use mainboards by Gigabyte, monitors by NEC and Samsung, IBM M13 keyboards, and multi-head video cards by nVidia. My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T41, which also runs Debian Linux.

For software, I try to keep a low profile. My windowmanager is ion2, which allows me to tile the screen with xterms and mostly avoid using the mouse. My favorite font is 6x10, and my color scheme is something that evolved over the years. For text editing, I use Vim. For mail, I use Mutt and GnuPG. For IRC, I use Irssi. For browsing, I use Firefox plus NoScript plus AdBlock Plus. For privacy, I also use Tor. I run Linuxnet IRC servers, Apache web servers, and an exim4 mail server. I coordinate non-IRC instant messaging through a set of gateways so that my IRC client handles all of the interaction. I use LaTeX to write not only research papers but most presentations and personal letters as well (occasionally I use OpenOffice for slides).

My ISP is Speakeasy. My domain registrar is GANDI (in France).

When not near a workstation or laptop, I have a Treo 750p (which runs a lovely SSH client called pssh) and a Motorola H12 noise-cancelling Bluetooth headset.

- Doc Searls