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
Thanks for this comment, too, Eduardo. You raise an interesting point about classical music. I have some classical music that I have ripped and a great whacking shelf full of classical CDs that I will get around to, some day...
For what it's worth, my experience to date with music players is that they don't serve classical interests very well. For instance, I would like to have a classical library and a non-classical library, because I would like my user interface for the classical library to be organized around composer and composition as well as artist / performer and album / track. But that extra bit doesn't work particularly well for popular music (or whatever you might wish to call it).
I kind of disagree with your "whole album" comment. As I'm sure you know, a lot of classical LPs and CDs package more than one work, often by other composers, performers, etc. Sometimes the packaging is inspired but most often I'm not too interested in an album that includes works by two unrelated composers who had no particular interest in or knowledge of the other's work. The nice thing about ripping this music is that I can separate the two works and make them stand on their own, provided that I can get the tags right...
Anyway! My point being, I guess, that classical music needs more / different player horsepower and a lot of curating. In my experience, anyway.
Thanks for your comment, Tony. Could you elaborate a bit as to why a player needs a plugin for midi files? Sounds intriguing...