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 nice comment, JanDe12. Any other recommendations?
What a great article, David! We "software types" are so conditioned to blame the code (and, dare I say, for some valid reasons) that when we encounter someone who suspects the hardware, we're ready to accuse them of Not Understanding Things.
Personally, I've dealt with flakey cables a number of times (though not yet a USB problem). I even had an 8-port switch that had a flakey port. I never determined whether that was just some intermittent physical problem (like a bent connector) or something electrical, because I spent so long diagnosing it that when I finally determined the problem, I hurled the entire unit into the nearest dumpster. Probably not the right thing to do, but it sure did feel good.