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
Hey Tim, great article!
One interesting thing I discovered about ffmpeg recently...
I was reading an article that suggested a .wav file converted to .flac and then back to .wav did not sound the same as the original. Huh, I thought - that seems pretty weird.
Strangely enough, using flac(1) to convert the 96/24 .wav to .flac and then ffmpeg to convert the .flac back to .wav truncated the sample size to 16 bits...
Not sure why that was. Made me also think that if replay gain was stored in the tags (not sure if this happens but I think it might) but lost in the conversion, the result could sound different due to loudness level.
Cool! Comparatively speaking I have zero GIMP experience. But I do know that the few times I have used it, the open source community has always come to the rescue with a relevant tutorial.
What this is all about!