Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Featured Blog Posts (410)

C# 4: Dynamic Types, Variance & Named Arguments

C# 4 adds some great features to what is already this language geek's favorite language. One of the overarching design goals of C# 4 is to be more dynamic. From the docs:

The major theme for C# 4.0 is dynamic programming. Increasingly, objects are “dynamic” in the sense that their structure and behavior is not captured by a static type, or at least not one that the compiler knows about when compiling your program.

Lets take a quick look at C# 4's… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 24, 2009 at 11:00am — 5 Comments

Community dynamics at Wikipedia: research done by the PARC - Augmented Social Cognition group

There's an interesting

post about the community dynamics of Wikipedia on the

PARC - Augmented Social Cognition site with several interesting ideas about Wikipedia and the maturation of a website community. This post concludes a four part series by summarizing work presented in a to-be-published paper by Bongwon Suh,… Continue

Added by Dan Starr on October 23, 2009 at 1:29pm — 2 Comments

Optimizing CSS with a simple Groovy script and CssTidy

Recently I've been working on a web project that requires quite an extensive CSS markup. Keeping it all in one file became unmanageable pretty quickly, so we've designed a way to split our styles into logical subdirectories with import statements, which is quite easily done with a css

@import tag. Here is an example of what a main file might look like:

@import 'common.css'; @import 'base.css';… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on October 15, 2009 at 2:00pm — 2 Comments

Building a Native OS X Desktop App: First Impressions

Not content to let Pat and Sherwin have all the fun with Cocoa development, I decided to dive in today. I just finished my first application. Its a simple note organizer for personal use I built to learn about OS X desktop development. Given the fact I'm new to the entire stack including… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 10, 2009 at 8:30pm — 40 Comments

The Web & Indigenous Cultures in Developing Countries

A few years ago the title of this post would have sounded bizarre, but its happening. From Fiji to Madagascar, we are observing the affect of web access on indigenous cultures. 99% of web access in these countries is by the wealthy few, but in some villages children walk hours to schools lucky enough to have a web connection. Village chiefs in Fiji often have mobile phones, and last month Vodafone Fiji starting offering iPhone. This will undoubtedly make web access in villages more… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 1, 2009 at 10:00am — 9 Comments

TechHui Featured Techie of the Month - Kim Binsted, Human Factors Expert, ICS Rockstar, and Intrepid Mars Simulator

Some geeks live in the lab. Others live on an entirely different planet - like Mars. Well, almost like Mars. Meet

Kim Binsted, our featured Techie of the Month. Kim is an associate professor at the University of Hawaii's Information and Computer Sciences(ICS) department. Binsted is also a co-investigator at the

UH-NASA Astrobiology Institute. She… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on September 29, 2009 at 8:00pm — 7 Comments

How Do We Best Support an Innovation Economy?

Aloha TechHui Members:

We would like to hear your opinion on this important issue for tech companies in Hawaii. After passage of Bill 199 restrictions on Act 221 tax credits in the last Legislative session, what legislative measures do you support to make investment capital for funding tech companies available in the next Legislative session in January 2010. Please take a few moments to fill out the… Continue

Added by Leighton K. Chong on September 21, 2009 at 4:30pm — 5 Comments

Localization in GWT using i18nCreator

I'm currently working on a GWT project for a large international company, so I've been spending some time before I really get too far into it to learn how to make this less painful to translate into multiple languages. I've found that GWT makes this a pretty simple task as long as you start with a little planning. Here I'm going to demonstrate the simplest possible example of localization, but I hope that it will be clear enough to explain how simple this is to accomplish and to maybe spare the… Continue

Added by Stephen McMahon on September 16, 2009 at 9:54pm — 1 Comment

Vote for Hawaii to receive 50,000 new books for children in need

Go to this page:

http://booksforkids.firstbook.org/whatbook/friend.php

You can fill in optional fields, or just hit submit. Winning state gets 50,000 new books for children in need. Hawaii is currently in third place, so we have a fighting chance. You can vote once a day - multiple votes are encouraged. The site appears to be legitimate with other opportunities to help as well.

Vote early and vote often! And don't tell your friends in other states… Continue

Added by Ken Berkun on September 14, 2009 at 7:24pm — 4 Comments

New Kam School Train Study Merits Real Consideration

Apparently, the Kamehameha Schools believes there is a better alternative to the overhead train package supported by the Hannemann Administration and many developers and contractors. This alternative would cost a lot less, be less disruptive for local businesses during the construction… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on September 13, 2009 at 7:00am — 5 Comments

An Overview of Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Aloha TechHuians! If you have been hearing about

GWT lately, but don't have the time to get into it, maybe this post sheds some light on more notable features that GWT offers, so you can make an educated decision about picking the right web technology for your next project. Google Web Toolkit is a Google product that aims to ease the pain of…

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Added by Konstantin A Lukin on September 12, 2009 at 11:00am — 10 Comments

Featured Scientist: UH Aquaculture Guru Dr. Tetsuzan Benny Ron

We had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Ron at the last

HVCA monthly luncheon. Benny gave an

engaging presentation on the past,… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 3, 2009 at 4:30pm — 3 Comments

Facebook Exodus Non-Story in the NYT

I normally don't comment on this sort of thing, but I received numerous links to Virginia Heffernan's vacuous NYT article titled Facebook Exodus. It must have been a very slow news day. By Virginia's own admission at the top of paragraph two, Facebook is growing at a furious rate. ComScore puts last month's unique visitors at 87.7 million and monthly growth at over 20%. To what exodus is she… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 1, 2009 at 3:00pm — 6 Comments

Synergy Between New & Traditional Media

With all the hype over Facebook, Twitter and other flashy social media channels the cries of, "Traditional Media is Dead!" are everywhere. Its clear that the traditional 30 second TV ad spot doesn't have the efficacy it once did, and papers that can't make the transition to well designed interactive web properties are in trouble. That being said, the declaration of the death of traditional media is premature.

When TechHui is mentioned on a local news channel or covered in a local… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on August 30, 2009 at 11:00am — 4 Comments

A New Model for Venture Capital Investment in Tech Companies in Hawaii

It is time that we put on our thinking caps and create a new model for venture capital investment more suited to our real circumstances in Hawaii. I advocate three major changes to the Hawaii venture capital model for tech companies:

1. Allow Act 221 to sunset, and implement the Act 215 State Private Investment Fund (SPIF) to be funded with up to $38 million in state tax credits that can be used to guarantee secured interest-bearing notes issued to lenders.

2. Have the… Continue

Added by Leighton K. Chong on August 27, 2009 at 5:00pm — 49 Comments

An Overview of Google App Engine (GAE)

These days, web developers are faced with a lot of difficult choices. One of them is which technology to pick for the next app, another is which hosting to use. It takes time and experience to make winning choices, especially when dealing with time sensitive deliverables. Back in the days developers had to do it all: configure a server, set up database access, get a static ip, etc... Configuring and supporting such a system could probably be a full time job in itself. Hence another… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on August 24, 2009 at 8:30pm — 3 Comments

Maui Super Computer center in the news

In todayʻs (8/22/09) Honolulu Advertiser, there is an article on the substantial increase in power for the Maui High Performance Computing Center and that about $350,000 in electricity a month is being used to power the Center.

To read the entire article CLICK HERE. The article shares what the center is used for. Among the users is… Continue

Added by Derek on August 22, 2009 at 11:25am — 1 Comment

Seawater cooled, solar powered data centers in Hawaii?

I was just readting this article "In the New Data Center, It’s Roofs Off and Taxes Down" and this phrase really caught my eye:

"Both Google and Microsoft continue to scour the globe for locations with cheap power, lots of bandwidth and friendly tax policies for their new data centers."

And I started thinking about the… Continue

Added by Peter Kay on August 17, 2009 at 7:56am — 3 Comments

A Visit to the Computer History Museum

Entrance to The Computer History Museum Mountain View, CA Nestled between the Google campus, LinkedIn and downtown Mountain View, is the Computer History Museum. Housed in the original headquarters of Silicon Graphics, the museum is the largest repository of computer equipment artifacts in the world. I never knew of its existence until I stumbled upon it a year ago while visiting a cousin in Mountain View. We use computers everyday yet we often take… Continue

Added by Francis L. Camacho on August 9, 2009 at 11:16pm — No Comments

Featured Techie: Astrodynamicist Moriba Jah

We had the pleasure of e-meeting Dr. Jah on TechHui a few months ago. We were excited to hear about the type of work he is doing on Maui at ASTRIA and AFRL in the areas of …

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Added by Daniel Leuck on August 6, 2009 at 10:30am — 3 Comments