All Blog Posts (680)

Are you a Hawaii-based developer or publisher of mobile apps? Do you develop for iOS, Android, Windows Phone (hee hee), Blackberry (HA!) or Symbian (srsly?)?

If so, let me know! I'm developing a feature story for AlohaStartups.com to highlight all of the great apps being created in Hawaii and want to include everyone. Whether you've coded from scratch, used…

Aloha everyone. I'm part of a start-up team that is participating in a U.S. Department of Energy contest called Apps for Energy. Our app and related cloud service offers consumers a way to receive points/miles by being more efficient with their use of electricity - I know, kinda boring...



The competition includes a category called the "Popular Choice" award and it's based solely on online votes. Here's what we need:

1. The app is called DRIVE™ Mobile App. You can access it…

On Monday Morning, I woke up to the following friendly message on my iPhone (grandfathered into "unlimited" plan). I will be switching away from them and I will not be doing business with AT&T ever again if I can help it. I will also be taking as many of their customers with me as I can!

"ATT Free Msg: Your data usage has reached 3GB this month. Using more than 3GB in future billing cycles will result in reduced speeds. You can use Wi-Fi to help avoid reduced speeds. Visit…

In recent years smartphones have become part of many people's daily lives.  They are used to communicate, stay updated, take photos, listen to music and entertain us with hundreds of thousands of apps. People carry their cellphones around with them wherever they go.  They wake up with them, eat with them and go to bed with them.  



For companies this presents another opportunity to market and reach out to customers.  If you or your company is considering a mobile presence there are…

http://www.kitv.com/news/hawaii/Sensors-watch-over-elderly-s-movements/-/8905354/12446558/-/vukm7d/-/index.html

The technologies are at home in a Residential Care facility, or in a Seniors house… Ho’okele Health Technologies really push the work of caring in the home to new heights, being fully integrated into a nursing EMR and Care based organisations core…

Finally, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was released this month.

The biggest addition for the environment was the addition of Gnome 3.4, Unity is still the default though… Boy Unity blows!

Here are the tweaks I did for my installation – mostly for better system handling. I also looked again at Unity and noticed some improvements, those tweaks are here too.

1. Change the Software Center Server Location

If you installed with a customized location, then the…

Earlier this year I was conducting a training class on programming and found I needed to provide trainees with some models for evaluating the maturity of a  technological concept, device, or platform. One such model that stuck with me over the years is Gartner Research's Hype Curve Model. If you are not familiar with them, Gartner is a technology research firm composed of independent analysts based around the world. Their Hype Curve Model…

A few years ago the release of the Go programming language was announced, but I ignored it until I recently

discovered it was being used on large back-end systems at Heroku and at Google.  I also discovered that the Go team  included Rob Pike (formerly from Bell Labs and member of the Unix…

Educators-Techies-Artists-Scientists-Professionals

A sharing, celebration, and networking of practices, resources and collective creativity

4:30-6:30 today Holualoa Elementary Cafeteria
Link to more Info

Microsoft has come a long way when it comes to support for unit tests.  They basically co-opted NUnit as their basic building block for testing.  Of course they re-branded it as MSTest and added feature/bug tracking and some more stuff all bundled together into TFS.

Given their willingness to get that deep into the unit test craze, their choice of interfaces for ObjectContext (on the server side) and DataServiceContext (on the client side) seems a bit odd.  There is no interface to be…

E-Waste Hawaii would like to thank all of the techies that recycled their e-waste in celebration of Earth Day!

We had fun in the (scorching!) sun, and would do it again in a heartbeat!

This post is just a friendly reminder for those that practice TDD/BDD to make sure they are not putting more ceremony into their tests than is necessary.  Use mocks and stubs instead!

Mocks are just stand-ins that behave like the thing we want it to represent.  Stubs will fake a method call and return a canned response.  These save time both in setting up the test and in running it (depending on if your real objects are persisted in a test database).  When you test a method…

Aloha TechHuians,

Apologies for being a bit late this month. I just returned from New York and I'm prepping to leave for Tokyo in a couple days. I'm getting too old for this :-)

This month we had some excellent blog posts including:

• Security Wargaming: Capture the Flag by Dan Nishimura…

When I talk to people from software development industry about usage of agile practices vs. waterfall they always tell me agile (e.g., Scrum) is the standard in project execution, that there is almost never a reason not do to it. The only reason I hear for waterfall usage are projects that actually require waterfall usage by contract (e.g., government projects) or projects that cannot be done in iterations (e.g., writing software for fighter jet).

To get to the bottom of this…

Recently Microsoft released ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta.  The new Web API framework is included along with this release as part of the ASP.NET and Microsoft web platform family.  The Web API framework is Microsoft’s latest solution to creating simple RESTful web services that can be consumed by a large range of clients. Unlike asmx and WCF services the Web API aims to be a simple RESTful way to create web APIs.



Getting Started:



If you do not have Visual…

I often find myself responsible for designing system architectures. This isn't an accident. I like figuring out the big picture that causes all the pieces of a system to fall into place. The better the architecture is, the more the answers to follow-on decisions (e..g, system boundaries, class hierarchies, internals APIs) seem self-evident. With a solid architecture, first-order features have elegant solutions that automatically extend to second-order features and system…

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in Stripe’s Capture the Flag, a security wargame designed to have you think like

an attacker and understand what it takes to produce a secure program. Participants are given an initial…

So, your jealous about all the new technology stacks that seem to make life so much easier? You no longer have to be.  With the help of a javascript library available at codeplex.com and a very simple implementation of WCF Data Services utilizing the latest Entity Framework, you can open up your data store to the world with ease.

Lets start with the Entity Framework.  It's the 3rd or 4th attempt by the boys at Redmond to provide a serviceable ORM with a Microsoft logo.  This…

Pacific Corporate Solutions…