January 2013 Blog Posts (11)

There's a lot of excitement around Hawaii's emerging startup accelerators.

Some people have said that Hawaii has tons of talent, all it needs is some money, others say it's the blind leading the blind.

I am out of touch with the details so I was wondering if anyone could shed light on the likely outcomes. What do you think? Will these accelerators succeed or fail?

Screen scraping is defined in Wikipedia as "a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Usually, such software programs simulate human exploration of the World Wide Web by either implementing low-level Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or embedding a fully-fledged web browser, such as…

You are a nonprofit or government agency looking for a way to invigorate your staff or constituents.

At the Applications for Good San Francisco hack-a-thon, staff and constituents from goodwill worked alongside developers to create a prototype solution for constituent engagement. This led to direct contact between user, agency and producer, a great formula for any product development.

You know there is a tech community where you live, but…

Wake up with the Institute on January 30th for our "Breakfast with the Institute"- Social Media Safety workshop.

Protect yourself online and stay in control of the information that your share. 

Cost: $10 per person

Location: The Box Jelly

To register: www.hismti.eventbrite.com

See you there!…

We enter the new year with over 3,000 members, a full event schedule, a newly reinvigorated blog, active job boards and plenty of great discussion about everything from…

Remote debugging is the process of viewing & editing the code behind a website on your own computer, but from a separate device. As mobile devices and mobile browsing continues to see exponential growth, it's becoming increasingly important to test and debug your web apps via remote debugging, since there's no way to  inspect a webpage's resources on a physical mobile device. Here are a few techniques I use for testing & debugging web apps on mobile devices today.

Remote…

Interruptions are the annoying, disruptive, beeping, booping constant of our lives -- phones ringing; notifications buzzing; bosses, coworkers, spouses and kids clamoring for our attention. How we react to them -- and the toll it takes on our productivity and concentration -- is a well-studied subject (see Wikipedia on…

I've been reading Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt, which talks a lot about experts. In particular, he discusses the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, and describes experts as having "…a vast body of experience that they can tap into and apply in just the right context. … These are the modern wizards."

Maybe on a good day.

A while back, a co-worker related a story about a design class he was teaching. He showed the class some…

With the new year come new resolutions to become a better person. If you're into software development (or looking to get into it), you may be looking to learn something new. I do believe that one of the most important things we can do as software engineers is to explore other technologies and programming languages. Seeing other approaches gives you additional perspective when trying to approach a problem. In the past, this typically meant picking up a book and spending a few days going…

Today Canonical officially announced Ubuntu for phones http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone.  Usually a new phone OS announcement is not much to get excited about, but Ubuntu’s entry has been anticipated for years.  I am interested in this because Canonical’s Ubuntu is the most widely adopted and supported Linux distribution and they are promising a level of convergence never seen before.  Eventually Ubuntu will be able to run the same OS on…