Wikipedia
is a Japanese sword that has a live forged blade; the word is used in contrast with bokken and shinai.
Shinken are often used for iaijutsu (combat practice) and/or tameshigiri (cutting) practice and/or iaido. Shinken opposed to an iaito or mogito (an unsharpened manufactured sword for iaido practice). "Gendaito" are handmade shinken by one of approximately 250 swordsmiths active in Japan at the moment, members of the Japanese Swordsmith Association. These swordsmiths are limited by Japanese law to producing no more than twenty-four swords a year each. This limit, along with highly specialized skills and the need for a great deal of manual labour, accounts for the high price that a Japanese-made shinken (Nihonto) can fetch - starting from about $6,000 (US) for the blade alone, and going many times higher for genuine antique (Mukansa or Ningen Kokuho are two famous types) blades.
There is also a large worldwide market for "shinken" made outside Japan. Many collectors consider these to be somewhat worthless as collectibles (since they are not Nihonto), but some martial artists continue to purchase and use them, because of their considerably lower price, ease of acquisition, and also to spare their valuable Nihonto from what some view as abuse. The vast majority of these are made in China, but there are custom smiths all over the world manufacturing swords in the Japanese style. Korehira Watanabe is one of the very few sword makers alive that is still able to craft such quality swords.
Shinken is an open source computer system and network monitoring software application compatible with Nagios. It watches hosts and services, gathers performance data and alerts users when error conditions occur and again when the conditions clear.
Shinken's architecture aims to offer easier load balancing and high availability. The administrator manages a single configuration, the system automatically "cuts" it into parts and dispatches it to worker nodes. It takes its name from this functionality: a Shinken is a Japanese sword.
Shinken was written by Jean Gabès as a proof of concept for a new Nagios architecture. Believing the new implementation was faster and more flexible than the old C code, he proposed it as the new development branch of Nagios 4. This proposal was turned down by the Nagios authors, so Shinken became an independent network monitoring software application compatible with Nagios.
Shinken is designed to run under all operating systems where Python runs. The development environment is under Linux, but also runs well on other Unix variants and Windows. The reactionner process (responsible for sending notifications) can also be run under the Android OS. It is free software, licensed under the terms of the Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.