Digital Shokunin

CarolinaCon 9 was this weekend in Raleigh, NC which I attended Saturday. I was also there as a representative of FALE to help host their lock pick village.

There were several talks given by some of the FALE members, one titled “Terminal Cornucopia” by treefort was on how ineffective TSA security theater is at preventing weapons from making it onto an airplane. There was a demonstration of a club called “Murica” made with items purchased in the terminal behind TSA security checkpoints consisting of a copy of the Declaration of Independence, with a pointy metal souvenir model of the Washington monument protruding from it. I actually missed this one, but saw and held the hefty “Murica” and can honestly say a violent individual could do some serious damage with it.

In the last year I’ve been picking up more and more Java, I did this for two reasons.

The most personal one is that I wanted to learn how to write Android programs. First, because I own an Android phone, second, the mobile platform is a platform where a small individual developer can write useful apps and there obviously is demand and a future for such skills on the market as well.

Those of us that use WebSphere Application Server in our environments as our J2EE application server have a very powerful tool to administrate or automate tasks from the command line, wsadmin. wsadmin is a command line utility that allows you to issue commands in a single server or network deployment (multiple servers in a single administrative domain or “cell”). If you are reading this you probably know all about it and its support for Python, or Jython environment as a language to issue commands and run scripts to handle a variety of tasks.

This is my first post using Pelican as my new blogging platform. I had considered using OctoPress but encountered too much trouble getting the ruby stack to work properly without dependency problems, even following directions or tutorials. So I looked for a Python alternative and found Pelican. I found it was much simpler to get running just following the directions. Plus, I know Python, so I’m obviously more comfortable with it then Ruby. I’ve never dealt with Ruby directly until OctoPress and my prior experience only included reading about it.