I've been meaning to follow up on Chris Sass' excellent post on growing pains.  A related side effect of code that has grown too complicated is unit tests that are impossible to decipher.  As your ActiveRecord model becomes bloated, the tests written for it have to mock out too many things.  This makes it nearly impossible to know why the test was created and what, exactly, is supposed…

HPU captured first place in the Hawaii site of this year's ACM International Programming contest, for the second year in a row. HPU's winning team placed 19th out of 111 teams in the Pacific Northwest Region, an impressive feat.



Winning team: Kevin Goo, Kenneth Chai, Kwok Cheung (four problems solved)

2nd place team: Jarred Jobe, Melvin Tomas, Jessia Soriano (three problems solved)

4th place team: Precious Binas, Abe Pineda, Nathaniel Befus (three problems solved)…

I always look for back-up options -- things I can rely on should everything go horribly wrong in a hurry. Blame it on my being a project manager. Or having lived in New York through 9/11.



While Superstorm Sandy cut a destructive swathe through the Northeast and dominated headlines in the week just past, there were odd, tiny parallels in O’ahu events that set me thinking about what basic tools and technologies I can rely on -- and, conversely, what my Achilles heels are -- when…

The Nov 8 seminar will be presented by Martin Hsia, Intellectual Property & Patent Attorney with Cades Schutte LLP, covering timely and effective registration of copyright for media, software & digital works, giving notice of copyright; policing infringements, counterfeits and takedowns, digital rights management and other Internet copyright protection tools, shrink-wrap licensing, civil and criminal enforcement, and U.S. Customs and International Trade Commission exclusion…

Check out our new classes and dates for 2013 at www.hismti.com!

Learn how to practice safe social media behavior at Hawaii Social Media Training Institute Safety Workshop this Saturday October 27th from 10am-2pm @ The Box jelly!

The Social Media Safety Workshop will share best practices for online, social media security and safety. The goal is to provide guidance and tips to having a presence online that allows you to safely navigate through this new age technology.



For $10 attendees will learn how to safely integrate social media…

This week, I'm deleting lots of my code.

This is actually a pretty common occurrence for me. In this case, a UI pattern that I came up with for a project works well in the small, but doesn't scale up. Other times, I've worked on a chunk of code and revisited it enough times that its structure was no longer clear, and the cognitive effort of remembering all its inconsistencies significantly outweighed the benefit of keeping it. Every once in a while I'll have thought of a better way to…

A few weeks ago Microsoft released a preview for TypeScript.  What is TypeScript and why would you use it?  Initially TypeScript may look very similar in function to CoffeeScript or Dart.  These are two technologies TypeScript often gets compared to because all three can be used to generate JavaScript.…

If you have been part of building an application that has lasted longer than a month then you've probably had some troubles as the project grows.   Business logic requirements get more and more complicated.  Features change direction.  You occasionally "hack" something just to satisfy a release or an urgent bug fix, saying "I can refactor/clean this up this later..."

Then one day "later..." is now.  New features are getting harder and harder to implement.  Everything seems intricately…

101 Million Americans Jobless : 41.47% Real Unemployment!!

Mr. President, who is giving an account of the 88.311 million Unemployed "not in the workforce?" Numbers do not lie ... Do the math.

Those who are "not in the workforce" i.e. ran out of unemployment benefits and are no longer included and therefore uncounted in the official Government statistics of "Unemployed" is actually 7x times greater than…

WCF is a framework for building service-oriented applications.  The flexibility of the framework makes it very powerful, but that power requires some wisdom in the implementation.  In this post, there will not be many answers, but I hope to help you determine what questions to ask.

Sharing assemblies between the server and the client

Many developers like to do things such as override ToString().  Not surprisingly, that code will not survive being sent over WCF.  It is…

Good Morning!  Hope everyone had a great Columbus Day! Im new to Tech Hui and am very excited to join in on this great community and converse back and forth with Hawaii's most talented minds!  I recently developed an app for the Android Platform designed to save lives.  Its called Monkey Message, which is a text to voice app created for our drivers in Hawaii to stay safe while commuting.  You're probably thinking "Well Bob, this isnt anything new, Siri does it, Vingo does it, whats the…

It's time to get Facebook savvy and take your skills to the next level!



Join us at the Hawaii Social Media Training Institute for our Advanced Facebook class on October 26th from 10:00AM-12:00PM!



This 2 hour session will cover:



* Case study; Successful Facebook Marketing Campaigns



* How to increase interactions from your fans



* How to effectively advertise on Facebook



* How to incorporate Facebook into your existing marketing…

Last week we made the basic WCF service, based on the template from VS2010.  A set of defaults that can be built on.  To make your own service, the assumption would be to make another interface, implement it, and then copy the app.config.  For the most part, that is correct.  What is less obvious is where those values come from, and what do they mean.  This week we will create our own service, and modify the app.config to expose it.  Everything we will do this week builds on the project from…

Windows Communication Foundation is a framework for building service-oriented applications.  Over the next several weeks, I intend to write about WCF and share some of my experience working with it.  This specific post covers a very simple getting started scenario.  It does not assume you know anything about WCF, or have ever seen it before.  It is a step-by-step guide to creating a service and a test case for it.  I do assume that you have a version of VS2010 that includes the test…

Over the past year, the City and County of Honolulu and Code for America pushed to make the city's data open to the public. The city has a tight budget and can only dedicate a small amount of resources to the creation of applications using this data, so opening it up allows people in the community to work with this data. Recently, they published a list of their available datasets …

The KCC/IPTL course session on Thurs 9/27 will be presented by Seth Reiss, Intellectual Property & Patent Attorney, covering how to select, clear, and put a distinctive trademark into use, registration, how to build trademark strength and value, enforcement of rights, and recommended practices for trademark asset management.  The fee for each session is $35.00.  For registration, please call KCC Continuing Ed Dept.

The 2012 Series on Intellectual Property Management offered…