Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

April 2009 Blog Posts (21)

Featured Scientist: Transgenesis Guru Stefan Moisyadi

I recently had the pleasure of meeting molecular biologist Stefan Moisyadi at one of Jay Fidel's ThinkTech meetings. During the meeting, and at lunch, we discussed topics ranging from mammalian transgenesis and microbubble drug delivery systems to the current political climate in Turkey and the proper way to make baklava. Every conversation with… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on April 29, 2009 at 9:30am — 3 Comments

500GB optical micro-holographic disk

Holographic storage. Finally.
I wonder how reliable, fast and expensive it is and when can I replace all my 500GB hard drives with something like this.

Link

Added by A. Sajjad Zaidi on April 27, 2009 at 5:11am — No Comments

Tech Resumes & Interviews

I hope you are all enjoying this beautiful weekend. Over the past few weeks we've received a number of questions about writing resumes and performing well in technical interviews. I thought it best to summarize our advice in a short blog post. Other employers are welcome to contribute.

Resumes

1. Show an interest in the company to which you are applying. Write a cover letter that describes why you are interested in that particular company, and why they should be… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on April 25, 2009 at 10:00am — 6 Comments

Learning from Failure, or There Goes My Golden Week Vacation

As a systems architect, I must concern myself with project management issues. Every now and then, I like to check my head and reread a wonderful blog post from Reg Braithwaite on What I've learned from failure. I printed up a copy and keep it in my notebook so that I can pull it out and read it on my train ride.

This is a timely topic for me as I now… Continue

Added by Brooke Fujita on April 22, 2009 at 4:05pm — 5 Comments

The World Digital Library is Now Online!

I've always liked UNESCO's homepages such as http://whc.unesco.org. One of my hobbies is traveling. I often check

UNESCO's world heritage site before I go traveling to foreign countries. Now

the World Digital Library is online! We don't need to visit the libraries in… Continue

Added by Mika Leuck on April 21, 2009 at 6:00pm — 4 Comments

HOWTO: Create a simple Groovlet

This post is for those who've heard about Serlvets and Groovy, but just don't have the time to put them together. Being no guru, I've developed a number of JSPs and Servlets in my professional carrier. Every time it is the same thing.. remembering method signatures, xml descriptors, etc.. It gets even worse if you want a Servlet to print out HTML content. Let's just put it this way - Java is not designed for simple Web development. There is always the JSP approach, which is still… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on April 21, 2009 at 5:30pm — 1 Comment

The things I don't like about Mixi

Mixi is the largest social network in Japan. With a lot of my friends in Japan, I can't help but use Mixi, but if I had a choice, I would convince my friends to switch to a different social networking platform like Facebook. Here is why.

Mixi Acitivity/Visited Log

Mixi has a feature that displays exactly who visited your page or blog. It sounds cool and you might think it encourages activity but to me, it's annoying because when I read my friend's blog, it leaves me… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on April 17, 2009 at 1:22pm — 5 Comments

Google Street View Car Spotted on the H1

I was driving home from work yesterday when i saw this car ahead of me with this huge apperatus on the roof. I sped up to take a better look when i saw the sticker on the side "google!! " I realized it must be the Google Street View Camera Car! I quickly whipped out my cheapo cell phone camera and snapped a pic. I wonder how long until they drive every road in town and we see it on google…

Added by Joe Segal on April 16, 2009 at 8:00am — 9 Comments

Indian Mathematics

A while ago, I watched a TV program on how incorporating Indian Mathematics in Japanese schools increased overall achievement in children. Indian Mathematics introduces cool shortcuts in math. The subject really interested me and I started to look into Indian Mathematics methods. Not all of them are easily explained but here are a few that I've learned. Note: This post won't be of interested to those brilliant mathematicians and techies on TechHui who can solve 8 digit problems in their head.… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on April 15, 2009 at 4:30pm — 4 Comments

Jennifer Lopez Foundation v. Jeremiah Tieman - a lesson in using celebrity names?

I'm almost embarrassed to say this but my girlfriend brought this arbitration case to my attention. It's not embarrassing that she told me about it, but of all the places (or sites) she could have heard about this case, it happened to be from the Perez Hilton site. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with Perez Hilton, I'm just not into gossip type sites or sites that I perceive to be gossip type… Continue

Added by Derek on April 11, 2009 at 2:30pm — No Comments

Twitter to be bought?

A day after my girlfriend (yes, that really is me with the mosaic-ed-out face and no she's not ashamed of me) wrote about Twitter and SEO value, I read an article in Pacific Business News about Google and Microsoft potentially interested in buying Twitter.

The article… Continue

Added by Derek on April 11, 2009 at 8:34am — 4 Comments

Cloud-based Content Delivery (Amazon vs. Rackspace)

Amazon

Amazon's file storage service is called S3 (or Simple Storage Service). Files stored on S3 can be downloaded directly from S3 servers to your end user's browser. Amazon has a

content delivery network (CDN) called

CloudFront which can take your files stored in S3 and… Continue

Added by Truman Leung on April 10, 2009 at 9:30am — 3 Comments

Twitter & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Value

Ever since I started Tweeting (which isn't too long ago), I've been wondering how the urls inserted into tweets contribute to SEO. So I started digging and thought I'd share my findings here on TechHui! If anyone has further insight, please post them as I am curious about this.

Before I start, when I say Search Engine Optimization, I refer to it in the context of getting a website ranked high on Google's SERP. One of the factors google considers when determining the order of SERP is… Continue

Added by Alyssa K on April 9, 2009 at 3:58pm — 7 Comments

Expression Web SuperPreview

Last summer, I made the switch to a MacBookPro as my main web development system. Since then I have been slack in testing my web designs with Internet Explorer. It's time now to start making sure my web designs are cross-platform compatible, not just Firefox-friendly. I have

VMWare Fusion installed on my Mac with Windows XP and Ubuntu. Running Fusion slows down my system (with 4 GB of SDRAM) so I use it sparingly. However, with Fusion I… Continue

Added by Truman Leung on April 8, 2009 at 10:36am — 6 Comments

Early Morning Adventures with GWT, Eclipse and AppEngine for Java

I have a conference call with people in Houston, Dubai and China starting at 3:30 A.M. every Wednesday and this morning while everyone was talking over one another on a topic that didn't concern me, I was able to check out this very cool new stuff! Finally -- the

GWT Eclipse plugin! …

Continue

Added by Stephen McMahon on April 8, 2009 at 5:58am — No Comments

Rescuecom v. Google

I debated with myself whether to blog about this on TechHui and as you can tell now, I've decided to do it although with reservations. Please see disclaimer at the end of this posting before reading. I've read the recent Rescuecom v. Google decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and thought a posting on the topic might be of interest to some TechHui members. Be sure to read the disclaimer below the actual posting.

Anyone else who is interested in this… Continue

Added by Derek on April 7, 2009 at 10:22pm — 4 Comments

New Web Addresses - Start of Domain Turf War?

I just read this post in USA today - New Web Address endings could be start of turf wars.

The article is talking about the possibility of opening Top Level Domains to anything from .a to .z. I could get scott.murphy. Or TechHui could change from TechHui.com to Tech.hui.

I'm not sure the benefits of an open TLD name space… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on April 7, 2009 at 12:30pm — 6 Comments

My landing page design was published!

So I was browsing around at Borders with my brother the other day.

My brother was looking through this book called “Web Design for ROI” and asked me what I thought of a particular landing page design for auto insurance. I took a look, and it was a picture of a landing page I had designed a while ago!

So I looked up the book online, and coincidentally, the entire chapter on form design was available to view online.

http://www.wd4roi.com/images/WD4ROI-CH8-Sample.pdf (look at… Continue

Added by Alyssa K on April 6, 2009 at 10:30am — 9 Comments

Broken Heart Trash Can(shitsuren gomibako)

If you just got out of a long relationship and plan to burn all those photos of your partner, Recruit in Japan just released an AIR application to do just that. The program is called

失恋ゴミ箱 (Brokenhearted Trash Can). After installing the AIR application, you select the photo you want to burn and the program will actually light the photo on fire. You watch it until the photo turns to ashes (w/ sad background music) and the program will permanently… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on April 6, 2009 at 8:30am — 2 Comments

Multi-Blog WordPress

I've discovered WordPress MU, a multi-blog version of WordPress. This allows me to have one instance of WordPress and one database to manage multiple blogs. The number of database tables grows proportionally with the number of blogs.

Added by Wayne Hirata on April 5, 2009 at 2:12pm — No Comments