Information Technology

Contents

• The Hacker Ethic
• HTML and Website Development
• Implementing Library Automation Software
• Networking and Systems Administration
• Developing Java Applications
• What I've Learned about Information Technology

          Having recently read The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen, I came to the realization that I was in fact a hacker. No, not by breaking into corporate databases (those are "Crackers" anyway), but by the way I came to learn about information technology. Most all of my exposure to information technology was not through formal instruction, but by honest intellectual curiosity and an interest in playing with something new on my own terms in my own time. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty and working like mad to understand the guts of something in my own way. It takes an individual with this kind of interest to understand and truly enjoy playing with information technology.

• The Hacker Ethic

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          After getting my undergraduate degree I went through a period of approximately a month before getting into the workforce. I spent this time poking around on the internet and signing up for my yahoo mail account. It was about then that I first signed up for a free website through geocities, and began developing webpages. The next month I worked days and days for hours at a time and working 24 hour periods just plunking around, building a website. A previous version of this site is archived under http://www.geocities.com/licinius/oldsite/. But I didn't learn HTML from a class, I learned it by doing it, and pushing my own limits. This background was where I was coming from when I began developing the HTML tutorial series for the student chapter of the American Society of Information Science and Technology. There is more information on this workshop series in my teaching and training section.

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          A similar hands on learning approach was taken when I created an Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) for my book collection. I had only worked with Innovative Interfaces cataloging software in my position at the Classics Library, and only then in a very limited capacity in a record editing project. So, working with the Librarycom.com software from CASPR was a new experience for me. And why would I pass up the chance to implement a free OPAC with a potential for holding up to 5,000 bibliographic records? The only problem was that there was no documentation on what to do. Each user has to sit down and figure out how to use the system individually and email questions to the support desk. But who needs a manual?

          Because I was only working on two classes over the summer I had a lot of time during those three months to explore little nuances of the system: what MARC record fields and subfields were available, how the software searches and retrieves results, what types of reports could be generated, etc. Over the course of this investigation I made continual contact with the database vendor to suggest improvements and change minor bits of functionality. But, the most important piece of information that I learned in that experience was how strange and unique every piece of cataloging software is. This catalog also helped push my interest in why catalogers break national standards to exploit holes in their cataloging software. You can read more about this in my Scholarly Argument area.

• The Eric S. Riley Collection OPAC

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          My original attempt to develop an interface for the SQL server led me down the road to Visual Basic. However, not having played around with any kind of programming since Basic in high school, this was a little out of my league. I was able to get the look, and what the pages were supposed to do and what type of information they were supposed to return, but actually connecting to the SQL database and making one program query the other was not proving easy. So, in my spring quarter I began taking my first high level programming course in Java. My hope is that by the end of the program I will have developed a Java application that can query the SQL server, return and edit data in the database. I'm developing the application with my lab partner Kim Prater using the Eclipse IDE. The code for the project will be available on this site in the near future.

• The Eclipse Project

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