All Blog Posts (777)

Gazing into the future is difficult.  It is fraught with error and generally limited by our finite experience and limited perspectives.  In spite of these obvious limitations, let’s play "what if" for a moment and pretend that we have a clue as to what might come to pass in future messaging systems.



Years ago I was at a conference in New York City.  I was gone…

Aloha TechHuians,

I'm sending the March newsletter a few days early to make you aware of a number of interesting upcoming events as well as imminent committee votes on key bills that affect the Hawaii tech community.



Events



Unconferenz

March 2 from 8am-4pm at Windward Community…

Facebook announced the launch of a new smart discovery engine that, for now, will focus on four areas: people, photos, places and interests.

It uses the power of your own network to give you highly personalized results for your search queries. Results will be ranked according to your friends and friends friends interactions.

Does this mean the end to Google, LinkedIn, Yelp, Foursquare and the rest?

I asked Robert Scoble if I could share…

Posted on behalf of HTDC…

There's a lot of excitement around Hawaii's emerging startup accelerators.

Some people have said that Hawaii has tons of talent, all it needs is some money, others say it's the blind leading the blind.

I am out of touch with the details so I was wondering if anyone could shed light on the likely outcomes. What do you think? Will these accelerators succeed or fail?

Screen scraping is defined in Wikipedia as "a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Usually, such software programs simulate human exploration of the World Wide Web by either implementing low-level Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or embedding a fully-fledged web browser, such as…

You are a nonprofit or government agency looking for a way to invigorate your staff or constituents.

At the Applications for Good San Francisco hack-a-thon, staff and constituents from goodwill worked alongside developers to create a prototype solution for constituent engagement. This led to direct contact between user, agency and producer, a great formula for any product development.

You know there is a tech community where you live, but…

Wake up with the Institute on January 30th for our "Breakfast with the Institute"- Social Media Safety workshop.

Protect yourself online and stay in control of the information that your share. 

Cost: $10 per person

Location: The Box Jelly

To register: www.hismti.eventbrite.com

See you there!…

We enter the new year with over 3,000 members, a full event schedule, a newly reinvigorated blog, active job boards and plenty of great discussion about everything from…

Remote debugging is the process of viewing & editing the code behind a website on your own computer, but from a separate device. As mobile devices and mobile browsing continues to see exponential growth, it's becoming increasingly important to test and debug your web apps via remote debugging, since there's no way to  inspect a webpage's resources on a physical mobile device. Here are a few techniques I use for testing & debugging web apps on mobile devices today.

Remote…

Interruptions are the annoying, disruptive, beeping, booping constant of our lives -- phones ringing; notifications buzzing; bosses, coworkers, spouses and kids clamoring for our attention. How we react to them -- and the toll it takes on our productivity and concentration -- is a well-studied subject (see Wikipedia on…

I've been reading Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt, which talks a lot about experts. In particular, he discusses the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, and describes experts as having "…a vast body of experience that they can tap into and apply in just the right context. … These are the modern wizards."

Maybe on a good day.

A while back, a co-worker related a story about a design class he was teaching. He showed the class some…

With the advent of xhr, more and more large code bases are finding their way onto the browser.  Now days, you can find applications with a million lines of code running in the browser.  And, as browsers get compliant to HTML5 this trend will only continue, the future looks bright.  

If you are planning on developing in the large for the browser, one of the first decisions you need to make is whether you should embrace javascript or avoid it.  There are many solutions that allow you to…

With the new year come new resolutions to become a better person. If you're into software development (or looking to get into it), you may be looking to learn something new. I do believe that one of the most important things we can do as software engineers is to explore other technologies and programming languages. Seeing other approaches gives you additional perspective when trying to approach a problem. In the past, this typically meant picking up a book and spending a few days going…

Most rails applications have some sort of "user" to represent either customers who are consuming the service or administrators that are publishing content to the web application.  It's important that these users are authenticated (ensuring that they are who they say they are).  For user authentication in a Ruby on Rails application, Devise is one of the best solutions out there.  It has a very active community and wide…

Today Canonical officially announced Ubuntu for phones http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone.  Usually a new phone OS announcement is not much to get excited about, but Ubuntu’s entry has been anticipated for years.  I am interested in this because Canonical’s Ubuntu is the most widely adopted and supported Linux distribution and they are promising a level of convergence never seen before.  Eventually Ubuntu will be able to run the same OS on…

This article was in Bloomberg: U.S. Internet Users Pay More for Slower Service.  I've read many pieces like this, but can't help myself.  The problem is familiar.  But each time, I hope to read that a solution is brewing somewhere.  After having lived and traveled in Asia, it was disheartening to see the state of broadband here.  Discovered that my Internet in Hawaii was…

I recently read a lifehacking story circulating around facebook that definitely impacted me more than any tech blog or news article all year. You may have read about it; it’s about a philosophy professor and his lecture on the jar of life. There are many versions of it out there, so here is my mashed up version of it:

The…

After my blog a couple of months ago about trading Microsoft, I couldn't help but wonder the same about Apple Inc. Once again, the same disclaimer applies: please do not consider this investment advice, just one commentary that may or may not be useful in your overall decision-making process.…

Looking into the future is a time honored tradition for us all especially at the end of the year. The debate about the future of broadband in Hawaii has been raging for a while and in relation to that we are doing a research project at University of Hawaii that needs your input.

Participate in the Future of Broadband in Hawaii…