Featured Blog Posts (410)

Ooh my little sneaky one, my infections one

When you gonna let me socialize, Corona!

Ohh you make my body ache, my breath shallow

Got to isolate myself- thank you Rona!

When’s this gonna stop, give it up, such a sneaky one

Gonna take my temp, to see if I’m getting worse

My, my, my, aye-aye- cough!

M-m-m-my Corona!

Stay six feet away, huh a-will ya, huh?

Far enough away to not catch my Corona

Keeping it…

Whenever you’re on a social network, like Facebook or Twitter, you know who your friends and family are. However, there are many accounts that you don’t know personally, which can be bots. How can you tell bot from human? This a general issue beyond just social media. Google supports an approach to this called reCAPTCHA which can require a user doing a task that a human can do better than a bot. However, when posting to a social network,…

Since March there’s been a competition going on, called the Purple Prize, that asks tech developers to team up with cultural practitioners to innovate technologies that serve Hawaiian culture and Hawaiʻi.…

The H-1B visa is commonly known as the Professional Worker's Visa and has been heavily used in the finance and tech industries as a tool for recruiting top international talent into information technology, software engineering and other specialized jobs in the information economy. A recent article in the New York Times, headlined "Large…

It used to be that to develop with Microsoft technologies developers would have to pay up for development tools if they wanted the best experience.  These days with all the options developers have, getting someone to pay for tools can be difficult.



Recently I wiped of one of my development machines and realized this is no longer the case while installing various tools.  



It's well known that Microsoft has been moving towards open sourcing many of their projects like…

Sooner or later, everyone who is in the tech field for the long run bumps up against the U.S. immigration system. The tech talent pool is global, our engineering schools have plenty of international grads looking to be placed into U.S. jobs, and smart international investors are looking for U.S. tech entrepreneurs to back. And the unanimous reaction to the immigration encounter is “the U.S. immigration system really sucks!”

A …

As a continuation of my blog posts regarding continuous delivery, I shall explore the continuous delivery options for WordPress websites since I was recently been involved in such a project.

One changing component of a WordPress website is its templates, which are written in PHP. This PHP source can be version controlled quite easily and integrated with a continuous delivery system.

However, another changing component of a WordPress website is its plugins and their…

Recently I’ve been interested in games created using JavaScript.  JavaScript is everywhere and works with a lot of devices and platforms including mobile devices that run on iOS, Android, Windows and FirefoxOS. On the web seems that games using HTML and JavaScript have started to replace those using older technologies like Flash.  Here is a list of JavaScript libraries that I have seen recommended for creating games. To compile this list I looked at libraries that are free,…

I like to hone my problem-solving skills by going over some programming contest questions and I also like to use programming contest problems in interviews because it allows me to gauge whether the candidate is a just a coder or a problem solver. That's not to say that if you can't come up with a correct solution, you aren't a problem solver -- if I'm the interviewer, I'm more interested in how you approach the problem and whether you can break up and present the problem in an abstract…

In my last blog post I wrote about Windows 10 preview for phones. Yesterday Microsoft released the latest technical preview for Windows 10 on desktops, build 10061. With the rumored end of July release date of Windows 10 here is a look at where Windows 10 is today.  The current build is the most refined one yet, but is still very buggy and hopefully…

“I never want to become a teacher.” — 20 year old me.

I stood at a crossroads as a junior in college. Organic Chemistry had destroyed any hope I had of going to medical school. I had declared Biology as my major, but I began to have second thoughts. I fell back on the thing I was good at, which was Mathematics. Still, I wasn’t sure what I would do with that degree.…

When I first started learning Ruby on Rails back in 2007, one thing was made clear: don’t even try setting it up on a Windows machine. Since then, we had some open source projects like RailsInstaller that make it really easy to set up a development environment on your machine. Also, with the advent of virtual machines…

About 15 seconds into this video you'll hear an alarm from an iOS app called Yurekuru, which is a Japanese word that translates to a shake or sway is…

People who know me know that I’ve been pretty busy lately. People who really know me know that I’m actually slammed. Yet, I’m taking a personal challenge to complete a small application in the month of March. As it turns out, I have an idea for a small bite-sized application that I can build in a month. It’s also a great chance to challenge myself to learn new frameworks and libraries.

The Problem

I’ve…

I was sitting at my desk on the 6th floor with a fresh cup of coffee that I bought from Tully's downstairs. They're a bit pricey, but they smelled and tasted so good I could never resist. I usually got a hot cup of the daily special and did so that day.

Took a few sips and started a discussion with a colleague about the project that we were on.

The desk I was assigned to was in the corner with a window overlooking a major street and I could see down it all the way to Shimbashi…

The slightly misnamed SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) protocol is in a sense a type-strong version of the much better know JSON interchange format.  The Ruby community clearly doesn't have as much affection for SOAP as the Java and .Net communities, but that makes sense as Ruby is a dynamic language with duck typing, which meshes better in philosophy with the lightweight JSON format, rather than the much more expressive and heavyweight SOAP format.

If given the choice between…

Nearly 2 years ago I blogged about my experiences using Windows Phone for 6 months. I’m back to update my impression of Windows Phone as a whole and also blog about Windows 10 for phones.  Windows Phone has gone through several updates and in early February 2015 Microsoft released the first Tech Preview for Windows 10 on…

As a reference for myself in the future and for others who may find this information useful, this blog post describes my experience with installing ArchLinux on a machine that requires Broadcom wireless drivers for Wi-Fi and Ethernet isn't available.

I recently decided to install ArchLinux on my…

On behalf of Ikayzo, inc., formerly a Manoa Innovation Center tenant, I respectfully submit testimony in STRONG SUPPORT of SB 627, the ten year extension of HTDC's land lease agreement with the University of Hawaii that facilitates uninterrupted operation of the Manoa Innovation Center.

The center played a critical role in the formation and scaling of both Ikayzo and Contix. In…