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Featured Blog Posts (410)

The Never Ending Tax Blog: Brief Answers to All Your Tax Questions

This is the first post in what I hope becomes a continuing blog with answers to the basic tax and accounting questions you technical specialists may have. Just ask away, and when I get the chance I'll answer your posts so you can run your companies right.

To get us started, my first blog post is on the subject of choice of entity. As with all of them, I'm going to keep it brief.

Most venture capitalists prefer C corporations for two primary reasons: they're self-contained… Continue

Added by Douglas Levin on March 28, 2009 at 11:11pm — 15 Comments

Font Technology & Design

Over the years I've seen some really interesting font technologies come and go including Apple's GX font morphing, AAT state tables and Adobe's Multiple Master Typeface technology, some of which was rolled into OpenType. These technologies struggled because of the enormous investment required to create a font that makes use of their features, and the limited return on investment for typographers. The latter problem is largely due to the…

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Added by Daniel Leuck on March 26, 2009 at 12:30pm — 7 Comments

Five Social Media Optimization Tips for Job Seekers/Professionals

I'm posting this here on techhui as a second article in a series of tips about social media optimization. These tips came about as an afterthought/extension of a workshop I had the opportunity to give at UH Manoa Outreach College this weekend, "How to Boost your Traffic and Success Online with Social Media Optimization"

For my second set of five SMO tips, I'm going to talk about social media… Continue

Added by Beau Mueller on March 24, 2009 at 10:30pm — No Comments

Online Media Network Journalists Interrogated by North Korea

This morning my thoughts are with Laura Ling and Euna Lee, American journalists for online media network Current TV, who are currently being interrogated in Pyongyang. These brave journalists were reporting on the gallery of horrors at the border of China and North Korea which include, amongst other things, starving families fleeing for their lives. I… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 24, 2009 at 8:27am — No Comments

Open Source legislation?

I'm working on a project pro-bono (yes, as in "free beer") for a state department with a very interesting problem. How many programs (as in "food stamps", not as in "vim") do you think the state offers? I don't know either, but I know there are plenty. How many people in the state actually understand the rules used to administer these programs? Far fewer than you think. The rules are complex even when they can be understood and reconciled with each other, which isn't always.

So, say… Continue

Added by Joe Dane on March 23, 2009 at 3:27pm — 3 Comments

Supermarkets of the Future

Have you ever wondered what supermarkets of the future would look like? Did you ever consider an online alternative to getting your groceries?

I am a surfer. I like to surf in the mornings. Then, sometimes, I do my grocery shopping. Once inside a supermarket, it is always the same thing. Looking for favorite brands, hunting for good prices, standing in lines, etc.. On average, a supermarket trip takes about 1 hour door to door. Does it have to be this way? Is there an… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on March 24, 2009 at 2:23am — 9 Comments

Virtual Singer Hatsune Miku

Here is an interesting case of music technology making history.

Last week the number 4 album in Japan's billboard charts (oricon chart) was by a virtual singer. The album called 'supercell' was released by Sony Music as a compilation of songs created using a software called 'Hatsune Miku'.

Hatsune Miku (初音ミク）is a music software released in later 2007 that uses vocaloid technology developed by Yamaha. Using Hatsune… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on March 21, 2009 at 12:00am — 3 Comments

Social Business Cards from Europe - Poken

Social business cards called Poken seem to be spreading in Europe and now they are expanding into

Japan. Poken is a little usb key chain that stores your social media informaton. At social events, you can quickly share this information with other Poken users by touching each others Poken. You can then go home, plug in the USB and you are… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on March 18, 2009 at 9:30am — 5 Comments

Hbase and EC2 for Google-like Search

I have built a SaaS company based on PHP and MySQL running on cPanel accounts with each customer running their own separate MySQL database. At some point I would like to create various applications for searching of data across customers. That's not possible right now because each customer is using a separate database.

I just discovered… Continue

Added by Truman Leung on March 17, 2009 at 8:30am — 1 Comment

The Nature of Genius

Have you ever met someone and thought, "Wow. He/she is Human 2.0"? There are some individuals who aren't just a little smarter than other people, they are playing in a whole different arena. My first experience with a person like this was a class I took from professor Moshe Lazar at USC. He spoke a dozen languages and had incredible insight on topics ranging from comparative theology and linguistics to mathematics and physics.… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 15, 2009 at 12:00pm — 21 Comments

Amazon EC2 cloud computing got much cheaper today...

Today Amazon introduced "reserved instance" pricing for users who tend to run long lived instances.

The usual pricing for a small instance is $0.10 per cpu-hour, which works out to about $73/month if you keep your instance alive 24x7.

With the reserved pricing you can pay a fixed amount for a term of 1 year or 3 years and get a reduced hourly usage rate of $.03 per cpu-hour For 1 year the up front fee is $325, for 3 years it's $500.

If you run your instance all… Continue

Added by Pat Niemeyer on March 12, 2009 at 11:42am — 4 Comments

HOWTO: Create your own Slide Show Gadget using WebAlbums and iGoogle API

Besides programming all day, I also like to take pictures. One problem, is that after taking cool pictures, I tend to forget about them.. Recently I had some time on my hands to dig into Google technologies, especially their GData and Gadget API. Since I am already using things like iGoogle, Picasa, and WebAlbums, I wondered how difficult is it to put these technologies together to create a simple Slide Show Gadget. So in this post, I would like to discuss how to create your own Slide Show… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on March 8, 2009 at 8:00pm — 6 Comments

Creative Blog Widgets in Japan

In my daily read of Japanese blogs, I come across some pretty cool blog widgets (or 'blog parts' as they are called in Japan). Here are some that I thought were pretty nifty:

Two Essential Widgets for Japanese Bloggers These first two widgets are very common and are used by many bloggers to analyze/promote their website. If you plan to start a blog in Japanese, I would highly recommend them.

Awasete… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on March 5, 2009 at 11:09pm — 6 Comments

Managing Software Developers Across Borders

Globalization is leading to more and more geographically distributed software development teams. Online outsource marketplaces such as eLance,

Rent a Coder and

Guru are enabling small and medium size businesses to leverage offshore development resources for the first time. Macroeconomic trends are causing an increasing number of large businesses to look… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 5, 2009 at 9:00am — 7 Comments

Featured Scientist: Author / Entrepreneur / Biofuel Innovator Adelheid Kuehnle

"Kuehnle AgroSystems’ mission is to be the seed source of elite algae for the world's developing biofuels and bioproducts industries."

Kuehnle AgroSystems CEO Adelheid Kuehnle is bringing a new business paradigm to the biofuel and bioproduct industries. Instead of creating a few algae strain products marketed to wide verticals, Kuehnle is able to tailor strains to specific… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 2, 2009 at 8:00pm — 5 Comments

Is Direct RIA the next Big Thing in Web development?

Being an open source web developer for the last 10 years, I have probably tried most of open source web related technologies out there in some flavor. It all started with good old HTML. To make a long story short, now web arena is populated with things like JSP, JSTL, JSF, etc.. and notably GWT. Even though JSP is still going to stick around, GWT revolutionized my development toolbox by introducing pure Java to the world of JavaScript. Some also like to call it JavaScript hell. It is true,… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on February 28, 2009 at 5:30pm — 2 Comments

iPhone for Everyone in Japan

One of Japan's largest cellphone carriers, Softbank Mobile just announced a new iPhone campaign called 'iPhone for Everyone'. With this new offer valid until late May, you can get an 8gb iPhone for

free (yup, 0 yen) or a 16gb iPhone for about $100 with a 2 year contract. The iPhone was released in Japan in July of 2008 and although it generated a ton of buzz, shortly after its release I started reading about …

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Added by Scott Murphy on February 25, 2009 at 9:30pm — 5 Comments

Browser SSL attacks presented at Black Hat...

Moxie Marlinspike gave a presentation titled: "New Tricks for Defeating SSL in Practice" at the Black Hat conference last week and released code that demonstrates practical, man in the middle based, attacks on browser security.

The results are a bit depressing, but not entirely new or unexpected. The attacks that he presented in the talk mostly skirt around SSL and while they… Continue

Added by Pat Niemeyer on February 24, 2009 at 5:57am — 5 Comments

A End to End Walk through our Java Stack...

In this post I will take a walk through our preferred Java application stack from end to end, noting what I consider to be some useful practices along the way. While it's a never ending process to re-evaluate packages and tools as time goes on, I have found that this basic architecture has held up quite well for many years. We've used it on numerous large commercial applications ranging from critical banking and finance apps to high volume entertainment sites. I'm not going to try to… Continue

Added by Pat Niemeyer on February 22, 2009 at 1:10pm — 10 Comments

Let GM Die

Better Companies with Better Technology Will Rise from the Ashes GM and Chrysler are back at our doorstep, hats in hand, asking for a bailout that could

exceed $130 billion. We should say, "No, and shame on you for asking!" GM is failing because of horrible mismanagement, a complete lack of long term planning, outdated technology and the fact that they make, by and large, high… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 18, 2009 at 9:00pm — 14 Comments