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Personal Information

Full Name

Rick Knowles

Location

Oimachi, Tokyo

Languages

English, Japanese (might just scrape a pass in nikyuu)

Short Bio

Originally an Electrical Engineer by training, but gave it up to be a "drone in a suit" as EE friends put it, aka chasing the money in IT / web-dev when the commercial web was still young.

Along the way ended up settling on java+sql+XSL as a primary language set after working in C, Visual C++, ASP, VB, Delphi, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby and more recently Haskell and Clojure.

One of the really sucky things about working in java is the seeming love of over-abstraction most of its practitioners have. The word "enterprise" when applied to software makes me cringe and then revert to the fetal position.

So it was around 2004 I wrote an FOSS java servlet container with the aim of being able to make java webdev as un-enterprise-ish as possible. It developed a small but pretty keen following, mostly cause it let people run java websites on their zauruses etc unmodified. Unfortunately the biggest project to ever use it was a Sun owned FOSS project called Hudson that Oracle is currently in the process of trying to turn into a cashcow by charging for "Enterprise support" ... Oracle is not without a sense of irony.

Kind of hoping to offer a bit to THS in the way of programming and VoIP experience, and pick up some of the electronics I forgot in the 15 years since university.

Hacking

Hacker Skills

Programming (java / sql / ajax / c), neural networks, text mining, genetic algorithms, VOIP, basic electronics (microcontrollers), audio / mixing.

I want to learn

Want to get back some of the analog electronics skills I used to have, and also start extending into microcontroller experiments for the sake of building low power devices that do things a full pc isn't needed for :)

My Tool Box

Have a few spare PC shells lying around. I'd be happy to help with any unix / web admin or phone setups required.

History

Member for

1 year 19 weeks

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