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 the comment, linuxmusiclover. A couple of ways to think about that. The first is that the key difference is Cantata is not a music player itself, but a front-end controller to the mpd music server. This is quite different than the players you mention, permitting the music server to run headless on one computer and the client to run on another, which is a great option for connecting to a home stereo. The second is that, in comparison to other mpd controllers / clients I've tried, Cantata has many more nice features common to integrated players, like scrobbling, fetching metadata, predefined streams... which makes it a much richer user experience than "those other controllers". Some users might prefer the more stripped-down approach, but I suspect that many coming from e.g. clementine would be more comfortable with Cantata if they move to an mpd-based environment.
Excellent article, Subhasish! Thanks very much for your contributions.