Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Featured Blog Posts (410)

Matt's "Magic: The Gathering" Card Database and Price Guide

I recently got back into a fantasy trading card game that I dropped when I was in college called "Magic: The Gathering". A lot has changed since I was an undergrad. Back then, the primary place for trading cards was the card shop. Nowadays, there are numerous online vendors and many card stores regularly accept online orders, mailing cards to distant locales. However, the navigation method for many of these sites is clunky, and browsing through all the cards that meet a qualification set like:… Continue

Added by Matthew Buscemi on February 18, 2010 at 10:00am — 4 Comments

Why Hawaii is an Ideal Choice for Google's Gigabit Network

Hawaii, home to nearly 1.3 million people, is the most isolated island chain on earth. Our state's unique geographic isolation presents special challenges in keeping our families, communities and businesses connected across our islands and to the outside world. The speed and quality of our connection to the net directly impacts our ability to communicate, educate, learn and conduct business. Despite the… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 15, 2010 at 8:30am — 44 Comments

Hawaii Needs a Cabinet Level CTO & Google Apps

In late 2008 Google posted the results of a comprehensive study by the Radicati Group regarding the reliability of Exchange, Lotus Notes, GroupWise and Gmail. They found that while Gmail averaged less than 15 minutes of downtime per month (almost all of which came from one outage in August of… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 11, 2010 at 3:00pm — 40 Comments

Featured Techie: Keiki-Pua Dancil, CEO of HiSciTech, the State's Largest Tech Advocacy Organization

Our Featured Techie post is usually a love fest, a testament to amazing things that some geek in Honolulu has accomplished, often against serious odds. This month's  belated Featured Techie is different. This is not to say that Keiki-Pua Dancil  doesn't have technology chops. Coming off a gig at one of a handful of biotech  startups in Hawai`i , Keiki-Pua (she prefers to be called that) is a rare combo  of bio smarts and business savvy. She sports a Harvard MBA and PhD in… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on February 6, 2010 at 6:01pm — 8 Comments

Project Management and Documentation Tools

The tools we use for managing software and design projects have evolved over the years. Last year

Scott added

Basecamp to our toolset. We've found its email based workflow easy to use, especially for customers. For small projects Basecamp is often all we need,… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on January 31, 2010 at 7:00am — 5 Comments

Haiti Relief - 4X Your Donation

Posted on behalf of Leigh-Ann Miyasato of Entrepreneurs Foundation of Hawai`i:

As you know, the devastation from a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti and multiple aftershocks of up to 6.0 in magnitude have left an already impoverished country reeling and in chaos.

Last week, the Austin Entrepreneurs Foundation launched a $600,000 Haiti Relief Fund to match donations from the EF network worldwide. Hawai`i… Continue

Added by Mika Leuck on January 23, 2010 at 9:30pm — 2 Comments

AppEngine Datastore Overview (based on Java SDK)

In this post, I'd like to share some of my development experience with AppEngine's data storage facility called BigTable. As you might already know, BigTable is different from a widely known relational persistence (RDBMS) in a way that it deals with Entities and Keys as opposed to tables and rows. It might not seem too obvious at first, but object-oriented persistence is radically different from its… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on January 17, 2010 at 5:30am — 1 Comment

"Revolutionizing" Accessibility to State Archived Documents

I don't suppose a lot of people in the tech industry actually go to the state archives, but this entry may be of interest to many of you nonetheless.

I have absolutely no idea how many other states have archives that includes its own pre-statehood period, but our Hawai'i State Archives has archived documents that pre-dates its own statehood by more than 100 years.

Have you, or someone you know, tried to go to our… Continue

Added by Derek on January 14, 2010 at 10:30am — 13 Comments

Hybrid Native / Web Apps

We just finished a very interesting hybrid application called Ilio Fun Facts for the Army Corps of Engineers (mahalo to Native Hawaiian Veterans for pulling us in on the project.) The project provides free MacBooks to a group of public grade schools in Waianae. The MacBooks have special logins and screensavers that help educate kids about unexploded ordnance. In addition to being technically interesting it was one of those projects that makes you feel good because it helps the community.… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on January 12, 2010 at 7:30pm — 6 Comments

What Was Your Favorite Project?

About 15 years ago (I'm terrible with dates) I was working with my old friend

Brent Ridenour on a software project in the Bay Area. During that time Brent lent me a book on

knot theory that reinvented my view of mathematics. I found the whole concept of… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on December 31, 2009 at 2:00pm — 5 Comments

Featured Techie: Haralds Jass, Founder and CEO of Superb Internet, Hawaii's Largest Web Hosting Company

In January 2009, Superb Internet Corp. relocated to Honolulu from Vancouver, Canada lock, stock and barrel. The Internet hosing and technology services company had decided to leave Canada for a number of reasons bu the move was a surprise to many in Hawaii. The traditional pattern for technology companies in the islands is launch small, grow to a larger size then leave. And the traditional reasons cited for leaving are usually cost of operating a business in Hawaii, lack of qualified… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on December 27, 2009 at 1:30pm — 15 Comments

Finally...

It's been a rough semester (I had to pull 4 all nighters this week), but we have finally finished a prototype of our game for my school's Demo Day presentation!

The game is called Poggle, and it's for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It's a difficult game to describe. In some ways, it's like a real-time "Rock Paper Scissor" game. The best feature (and one of the more complicated) is that it can… Continue

Added by Sherwin Gao on December 16, 2009 at 1:00pm — 4 Comments

TechHui Meta Contest

Aloha TechHuians. As part of our initiative to grow the TechHui community, we are announcing what is, to our knowledge, the world's first meta-contest. This is a contest to come up with a clever contest :-) The winner of the meta-contest will have their choice of two months of free top level sponsorship (see the Sponsors area to the right) on the TechHui site, a $998 value, or the new… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on December 15, 2009 at 1:30pm — 43 Comments

Hawaii's Feed-In Tariff: More Information Needed, Pronto - Big Backers Like Hawaii But Need Details, Economics

In my time working on the U.S. Mainland (I'm splitting time there now between SF and HNL), I've been talking to a lot of top-tier venture capitalists, energy project financiers, and investment bankers involved in green energy. After finding out that I was from Hawaii, a number of them have asked me about the state's new Feed-In Tariff. They wanted detailed information so that they could see if clean energy projects in Hawaii might pencil out. Sadly, I had to tell them that the FIT at present… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on December 6, 2009 at 10:11am — 1 Comment

Renewable Energy Permitting

Sent to us by Jim Thompson:

There was a conference call this morning with representatives of the Hawaii Science and Technology Council, the UH Energy Policy Forum, the Farm Bureau, Senator Carol Fukunaga's Renewable Energy Sub-Group, Sun Fuels on the Big Island, and Pacific Bio-Fuel on Maui.

There was unanimous concensus to forward the attached package…

Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on December 3, 2009 at 1:00pm — No Comments

TechHui Featured Techie of the Month - Darren Kimura, CEO of Sopogy and Confirmed Energy Geek

Darren T. Kimura is an energy geek. While still in college he founded his first-energy related business, a consultancy focused on helping businesses conserve power and save money. He launched that business out of a the back of a beat-up Chevy Blazer. Today, Kimura is a top executive of two of Hawaii's most prominent energy companies, …

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Added by Alex Salkever on November 30, 2009 at 8:30am — 5 Comments

Framework for Developing a Statewide Innovation Plan

Posted on Behalf of the

High Technology Development Corporation From HTDC CEO

Yuka Nagashima: HTDC started working on this document in anticipation of the State's need to have a coherent implementation plan for establishing Hawaii's innovation economy last year. This document evolved as we also accommodated the needs of other economic development practitioners and industry… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on November 13, 2009 at 11:00am — 6 Comments

Google Go

I just read through the language spec and memory model for Go, Google's new language (thank you for the link Scott.) There are a lot of things l like about the language, such as its approach to concurrency, heavy use of type inference (which we also see in C# and Java 7), ruby-like array and map manipulation syntax, etc., but I'm not entirely sold on the type system. Go has no… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on November 11, 2009 at 2:00am — 21 Comments

Featured Techie: Seth Ladd, Organizer of Aloha on Rails Conference and Ruby on Rails Guru

On October 5th, the

"Aloha on Rails" Conference kicked off at the

Marriott Waikiki Hotel. The event was one of the top

Ruby on Rails regional conferences in 2009. These conferences bring together practitioners of and experts in Ruby on Rails, a software development framework that has become increasingly popular in the world of… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on November 6, 2009 at 7:30pm — 4 Comments

Howto manage Cron Jobs and Task Queues using Google AppEngine

In the process of discovering Google AppEngine's list of available features, I recently came across Cron Jobs and Task Queues. During my fairly extensive web development carrier, these terms always seemed like far away concepts that will not likely be a part of my average web development toolkit. At first, seeing these in AppEngine reminded me of those old mainframe systems that you read about in computer science manuals. One day I had some time to actually look into… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on October 26, 2009 at 5:00pm — No Comments