Web Site Security Tips

When developing web sites it’s a good practice to address security from the start.  Here are some basic security tips that I find many sites overlook.

1. Use different passwords for your server, database, FTP and other logins.  I am often surprised to find many sites that use the same admin password for all their systems or use the same default password without forcing a password…

Turn any WordPress blog into a full-blown membership site.  Perfect solution for those advance Internet Marketers that are now needed a cloud space to allow their subscribers to get your specialized training! 

It is simple and you can use it for any WordPress site, simply download unzip, upload to your blog site!  You will be able to completely manage your usership and features on the site.  Upload your videos, e-books, audio files!  This…

We use Heroku, a PaaS (Platform as a Service) vendor, quite often for hosting small and medium-sized web applications. It makes it drop-dead simple to install, deploy, maintain, and scale your projects on Amazon AWS's infrastructure. Being a fully managed service, they also take care of ongoing hardware and OS-level maintenance, and have engineers around-the-clock monitoring and responding to infrastructure emergencies. Furthermore, they…

They're baaaack! We fought SOPA but now the media companies have come up with something even worse - and they're trying to get it through via the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty. https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

A team that includes three co-founders from Bump Networks on Maui is about to launch FlikDate, a nifty looking mobile video dating app. They got covered in TechCrunch three weeks ago!

It's kinda like ChatRoulette but uses FBConnect for signups, so people are less likely to act badly (and they can be easily tracked and bounced). The monetization…

I know "Microsoft" is not the first word that comes mind when you're writing a ruby application but since Google dropped the free tier for their translation service the Microsoft Translator API is a good alternative for a small/personal project that you don't want to have to bother with the monthly bill.  

Recently I've had to use this API in a project and this weekend I extracted the functionality out into a simple gem.  I present to you 'microsoft_translator'  (queue…

Aloha everyone. This is a follow-up to my post of a few days ago.  Our project was featured on KITV:  http://www.kitv.com/news/entertainment/Social-Wire-DRIVE-App/-/8905032/14182350/-/lfrega/-/index.html

Still need community support, so appreciate continued daily voting (if you have time) or just one vote.  Here's our entry into the Department of Energy's Apps…

(Note: This post originally appeared on Aloha Startups, but it's important to get everyone in Hawaii's tech community weighing in on this topic. Please add your comments and continue the conversation. Also, if you have thoughts about Hawaii's first accelerator, which was recently announced, email Rechung Fujihira with your ideas.)

Seems like every other person I talk with has a plan for a local incubator…

Are you a Hawaii-based developer or publisher of mobile apps? Do you develop for iOS, Android, Windows Phone (hee hee), Blackberry (HA!) or Symbian (srsly?)?

If so, let me know! I'm developing a feature story for AlohaStartups.com to highlight all of the great apps being created in Hawaii and want to include everyone. Whether you've coded from scratch, used…

Aloha everyone. I'm part of a start-up team that is participating in a U.S. Department of Energy contest called Apps for Energy. Our app and related cloud service offers consumers a way to receive points/miles by being more efficient with their use of electricity - I know, kinda boring...



The competition includes a category called the "Popular Choice" award and it's based solely on online votes. Here's what we need:

1. The app is called DRIVE™ Mobile App. You can access it…

In recent years smartphones have become part of many people's daily lives.  They are used to communicate, stay updated, take photos, listen to music and entertain us with hundreds of thousands of apps. People carry their cellphones around with them wherever they go.  They wake up with them, eat with them and go to bed with them.  



For companies this presents another opportunity to market and reach out to customers.  If you or your company is considering a mobile presence there are…

Earlier this year I was conducting a training class on programming and found I needed to provide trainees with some models for evaluating the maturity of a  technological concept, device, or platform. One such model that stuck with me over the years is Gartner Research's Hype Curve Model. If you are not familiar with them, Gartner is a technology research firm composed of independent analysts based around the world. Their Hype Curve Model…

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4:30-6:30 today Holualoa Elementary Cafeteria
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Microsoft has come a long way when it comes to support for unit tests.  They basically co-opted NUnit as their basic building block for testing.  Of course they re-branded it as MSTest and added feature/bug tracking and some more stuff all bundled together into TFS.

Given their willingness to get that deep into the unit test craze, their choice of interfaces for ObjectContext (on the server side) and DataServiceContext (on the client side) seems a bit odd.  There is no interface to be…

E-Waste Hawaii would like to thank all of the techies that recycled their e-waste in celebration of Earth Day!

We had fun in the (scorching!) sun, and would do it again in a heartbeat!

This post is just a friendly reminder for those that practice TDD/BDD to make sure they are not putting more ceremony into their tests than is necessary.  Use mocks and stubs instead!

Mocks are just stand-ins that behave like the thing we want it to represent.  Stubs will fake a method call and return a canned response.  These save time both in setting up the test and in running it (depending on if your real objects are persisted in a test database).  When you test a method…

Aloha TechHuians,

Apologies for being a bit late this month. I just returned from New York and I'm prepping to leave for Tokyo in a couple days. I'm getting too old for this :-)

This month we had some excellent blog posts including:

• Security Wargaming: Capture the Flag by Dan Nishimura…

When I talk to people from software development industry about usage of agile practices vs. waterfall they always tell me agile (e.g., Scrum) is the standard in project execution, that there is almost never a reason not do to it. The only reason I hear for waterfall usage are projects that actually require waterfall usage by contract (e.g., government projects) or projects that cannot be done in iterations (e.g., writing software for fighter jet).

To get to the bottom of this…

Recently Microsoft released ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta.  The new Web API framework is included along with this release as part of the ASP.NET and Microsoft web platform family.  The Web API framework is Microsoft’s latest solution to creating simple RESTful web services that can be consumed by a large range of clients. Unlike asmx and WCF services the Web API aims to be a simple RESTful way to create web APIs.



Getting Started:



If you do not have Visual…

I often find myself responsible for designing system architectures. This isn't an accident. I like figuring out the big picture that causes all the pieces of a system to fall into place. The better the architecture is, the more the answers to follow-on decisions (e..g, system boundaries, class hierarchies, internals APIs) seem self-evident. With a solid architecture, first-order features have elegant solutions that automatically extend to second-order features and system…