Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Daniel Leuck's Blog (146)

Japan's High Tech Vending Machines

Vending machines have come a long way since Heron of Alexandria introduced his coin operated holy water dispenser in the first century. Today's Japanese vending machines are full blown computers with large interactive color displays, blue tooth, …

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Added by Daniel Leuck on September 7, 2008 at 2:00am — 6 Comments

Lightweight Language Future

While in Tokyo we attended the Lightweight Language Future conference. Talks were given by Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, and

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the inventor of Ruby. Larry's talk on Perl 6 was very interesting. I didn't realize Perl 6… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 7, 2008 at 12:00am — 4 Comments

Monthly Newsletter

Aloha from Tokyo,

We are enjoying a healthy diet of sushi and cube melons :-) Its been a busy month on TechHui! We are up to 450 members and many new members are active in the forums. Its been great to see all the activity from UH professors and students, in particular Professor

Philip Johnson and UH grad

Aaron… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 3, 2008 at 12:30am — 3 Comments

Featured Techie: Truman Leung

I can't say enough good things about Truman. His

Ascribe SaaS church management application is an incredible feat for a single programmer. Its slick,

feature rich and increasingly popular. We would… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 3, 2008 at 12:00am — No Comments

Tokyo, Hawaii Tech Activity, Random Thoughts

Aloha TechHuians. Mika and I are off for Tokyo this morning for a demo-palooza. I'll be offline for a bit. Hopefully we will see some blog posts from community members.

I was just chatting with Sid from TechOahu about the level of activity in the tech community on Oahu. Over the past six months it seems like the usual meet-ups have doubled or tripled in size. Interesting technology events are… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on August 27, 2008 at 8:30am — No Comments

TechHui Blog Rules

Aloha Folks. I hope everyone's weekend is off to a good start. I just wanted to remind our regulars and notify new members of our policy with regard to the blog. The relevant section of our FAQ states:

Q: Can anyone use the blog? What are the rules?

Yes. The rules are:

1) Entries should be about technology, technology business or new media.

2) Entries should be at least a few sentences…

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Added by Daniel Leuck on August 23, 2008 at 1:00am — No Comments

Asia's Social Web

One of the challenges presented by the joint US/Japan/China debut we are planning for ooi is the necessity of keeping our eye on three rapidly evolving markets. Although its time intensive, it is fascinating to observe the differences in each country. As Scott observed in the …

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Added by Daniel Leuck on August 18, 2008 at 6:00pm — 6 Comments

Social Networks, Anonymity, Reputation & Aloha

Last night I was chatting with Laurel and the guys from

Chi.mp about online identities and anonymity. I had a similar discussion with

Roxanne Darling about profile pics. Social network mediators are often faced with… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on August 17, 2008 at 7:30pm — 13 Comments

August Featured Techie: Clifton Royston

I met Clifton in 1995 shortly after he launched LavaNet with current HTDC Executive Director Yuka Nagashima. It was immediately apparent Clifton had a rare mix of great tech skills and keen business acumen. At the helm of award winning LaveNet Clifton helped bring quality internet service to Hawaii. He is… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 30, 2008 at 10:00pm — 3 Comments

i18n: From Day One

Companies that fail to internationalize their web applications at an early stage often miss out on big opportunities. With China having recently passed the US in terms of total web users and European online advertising revenue rising 40% annually, it is absolutely crazy to ignore international markets. It constantly amazes me how many successful US web app companies… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 28, 2008 at 6:30pm — 8 Comments

Hazards of Machine Translation: Eat at the Server Error (yum!)

Apparently there has been some hasty Babel Fish translation going on in China in preparation for the Olympics. The Chinese characters pictured mean "restaurant". The sign looks rather expensive! :-)

(from Geekologie) Having worked in the… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 21, 2008 at 4:00pm — 8 Comments

What Was Your First Programming Language?

Following up on last week's " What was your first computer?" question (the

VIC-20 was a clear winner), this week's question is "What was your first programming language?" Thinking back, I initially thought it was Level Basic… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 14, 2008 at 2:00pm — 38 Comments

GWT: Finally A Java Web Framework That Doesn't Suck

Although Ikayzo does web development, I've personally been doing mostly desktop development for the past five years. I've worked with Swing, SWT, WinForms and WPF. Every time I was forced to work on web projects I cringed because the UI piece was so much uglier and less evolved than any of the aforementioned desktop frameworks. Recently… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 11, 2008 at 7:30pm — 6 Comments

What Was Your First Computer?

The first computer I used was a TRS-80 back in grade school. They had a dozen of them at the local science center where I took classes after school. I learned to program in BASIC and store my inventions on a cassette tape.

The first machine I owned was an… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 9, 2008 at 5:30pm — 51 Comments

Google Launches Virtual World Builder

Google just announced a virtual world builder called Lively. Although its currently more of a 3D chat room type app I can easily see it evolving into a hyperlinked universe of rooms that competes with

Second Life. Lively environments can be embedded in web pages, which is a huge advantage… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 8, 2008 at 11:30am — 7 Comments

Successful Offshore Outsourcing

At this point in my career I've worked on quite a few outsourcing projects. I've worked for companies in Japan, the UK and the US doing outsourcing to Russia, India, Argentina, and various countries in Eastern Europe. I've seen projects that benefited greatly from offshore outsourcing, and I've seen projects turned into unmitigated disasters. In this post, I thought… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 4, 2008 at 11:30am — No Comments

July Featured Techie: Bruce Kim

I've always had great respect for Bruce, both as a technologist and a business man. He built

Inovaware from a piece of billing software he wrote for a local ISP into a leading provider of billing and CRM applications with customers from New York to Tokyo. Now Inovaware… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 30, 2008 at 9:00pm — No Comments

Microsoft + Yahoo, Take 2

This morning TechCrunch and

CNET reported talks are back on, with conflicting stories on the exact nature of the deal. CNET reported that Microsoft proposed a more favorable search-only deal. TechCrunch… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 24, 2008 at 5:30pm — 1 Comment

9 Ways TechHui Can Benefit You

I know TechHui is a community for techies in Hawaii, but what can TechHui do for me? The answer depends on who you are and what you do. Whether you are a Linux enthusiast, an EE professor or a Java developer thinking about moving to the islands, there is something here for you. We've compiled some ideas that cover employers, employees, socialites and nerds… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 15, 2008 at 7:30pm — No Comments

OS X Menus Anger Me

I recently changed from a Windows laptop to a MacBook Pro for my main machine. I have always been familiar with OS X because others in the office use it and I test Swing applications on OS X for customers. The transition to OS X on my primary machine has been relatively painless. For the most part the UI is elegant, aesthetically pleasing and provides a great user… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 12, 2008 at 7:30pm — 8 Comments