Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Ack! about bit rate; neither approach is optimal but you can:
1. right-click on the song info showing at the top and choose Information from the context menu
2. look in /proc/asound/your-device until you find hw_params for your PCM playback device.
Neither offers an instantaneous / updated view.
A great article. I first started using vi in 1984 on our first Unix box, made by a company called Convergent Technologies. I recall cursing it for quite awhile but one day my fingers had learned all the commands I need and for the last 30 years or so it has been the number one choice for me; and since 2005 that's been vim.
I think the interesting thing about both vi(m) and emacs is that once a person gets to the level where they don't need to think about how to do things and can concentrate on what they are doing, it becomes painful to use another editor, especially one that forces the user to futz with the mouse.
I don't see anyone mentioning it above but there is vi-like plugin for the Netbeans IDE that mostly gives you vi in the code composition window.