Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

All Blog Posts (799)

congratulations to dan leuck for winning 2008 high tech leader award

congratulations goes out to dan leuck for winning one of the high tech leaders awards from the 2008 flavors of technology and technology industry awards sponsored by Technology News Bytes and the Pacific Technology Foundation this past weekend. dan has been be an awesome leader in the techhui community and really well respected throughout our industry. i know i… Continue

Added by aaron kagawa on October 7, 2008 at 12:45am — 6 Comments

State wants to know about small businesses in Hawaii that do app dev & other IT projects

I just got this from Senator Sam Slom. Pls take a look and if you are a small company that does application development and other IT projects, pls reply to this thread with your name, company, web, phone, & email address. I'll pass the link on to the parties concerned.

Hope this means you get a chance to bid on some deals!

"Hello, my name is Debra Gagne and I am the administrator for the Information and Communications Services division for the State of Hawaii. Russ… Continue

Added by Peter Kay on October 7, 2008 at 12:00am — 9 Comments

Projects needing developer help

I teach beginner web classes occasionally at UH. The classes often have people who have web ideas and want to know how to make a snazzy web site. After the class is over, they quickly conclude that it is going to be awhile before they are able to execute their ideas, so they ask me to make sites for them.

I am too busy and I often lack the talent to do what they want. I have a few projects lined up that require developer help. If you have interest in any of these, please contact me… Continue

Added by Blaine Fergerstrom on October 6, 2008 at 10:22am — 3 Comments

October Featured Techie: Kevin Hughes

I was introduced to Kevin four years ago by my good friend Olin Lagon. It was immediately apparent Kevin possessed a rare combination of technical skills and a keen aesthetic sense. Kevin doesn't program UIs, he sculpts them. One of the best examples of Kevin’s superb UI work is SproutBuilder. There are quite a few Flash widget… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 1, 2008 at 9:00am — No Comments

Dev Resumes & Cheesy Car Salesman

Despite having done hundreds of developer phone screens over the past few years the amount of BS found in today's resumes continues to astound me. The problem is particularly acute in the US for reasons that could be the subject of a very long post. Many of the resumes we review amount to little more than marketing material dressed up by overly enthusiastic… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 26, 2008 at 8:00pm — 6 Comments

GWT + GXT: Ups and Downs

Two months after diving in with GWT I would characterize my experience as mostly positive. The Java to Javascript translation is amazing. I have yet to trip up the compiler, even when using complex combinations of generics, anonymous inner classes, etc. This is an impressive feat of engineering. The ability to trivially create rich desktop-like UIs is fantastic. Many… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 21, 2008 at 8:00pm — 8 Comments

Japan's High Tech Vending Machines

Vending machines have come a long way since Heron of Alexandria introduced his coin operated holy water dispenser in the first century. Today's Japanese vending machines are full blown computers with large interactive color displays, blue tooth, …

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Added by Daniel Leuck on September 7, 2008 at 2:00am — 6 Comments

Lightweight Language Future

While in Tokyo we attended the Lightweight Language Future conference. Talks were given by Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, and

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the inventor of Ruby. Larry's talk on Perl 6 was very interesting. I didn't realize Perl 6… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 7, 2008 at 12:00am — 4 Comments

Monthly Newsletter

Aloha from Tokyo,

We are enjoying a healthy diet of sushi and cube melons :-) Its been a busy month on TechHui! We are up to 450 members and many new members are active in the forums. Its been great to see all the activity from UH professors and students, in particular Professor

Philip Johnson and UH grad

Aaron… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 3, 2008 at 12:30am — 3 Comments

Featured Techie: Truman Leung

I can't say enough good things about Truman. His

Ascribe SaaS church management application is an incredible feat for a single programmer. Its slick,

feature rich and increasingly popular. We would… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 3, 2008 at 12:00am — No Comments

Shoes, posture, code?

In April I walked many kilometers in Paris. After quite a few days of walking, sipping coffee and practicing my terrible French, I read a fascinating article on the problems we cause ourselves by wearing shoes with padding in the heels (I'm oversimplifying; feel free to read the article yourself). The padding insulates us from our repeated impacts, and we can't feel how we're walking. The article claims that this slowly damages our… Continue

Added by Kurt Sussman on August 30, 2008 at 11:40pm — 5 Comments

Tokyo, Hawaii Tech Activity, Random Thoughts

Aloha TechHuians. Mika and I are off for Tokyo this morning for a demo-palooza. I'll be offline for a bit. Hopefully we will see some blog posts from community members.

I was just chatting with Sid from TechOahu about the level of activity in the tech community on Oahu. Over the past six months it seems like the usual meet-ups have doubled or tripled in size. Interesting technology events are… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on August 27, 2008 at 8:30am — No Comments

TechHui Blog Rules

Aloha Folks. I hope everyone's weekend is off to a good start. I just wanted to remind our regulars and notify new members of our policy with regard to the blog. The relevant section of our FAQ states:

Q: Can anyone use the blog? What are the rules?

Yes. The rules are:

1) Entries should be about technology, technology business or new media.

2) Entries should be at least a few sentences…

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Added by Daniel Leuck on August 23, 2008 at 1:00am — No Comments

No more business cards?

I subscribe to too many RSS feeds (via a nice RSS-to-email script on my email server), and every so often I go through and delete a pile of them. One of the most-deleted is 'VentureBeat', a log of who got funded, and who wants to be funded. Once in a while a really interesting post comes through, though, and I think this is one of those: Get rid of business cards.

I'm in favor of eliminating the practice of giving… Continue

Added by Kurt Sussman on August 19, 2008 at 9:57am — 4 Comments

TopCoder Software Engineering Competition

Exciting news! The University of Hawaii Information and Computer Sciences Department is putting on a coding competition (see http://www.ics.hawaii.edu/news/department-of-information-and-computer...). This is great news and should be a really fun experience for the students.

To help the ICS department we have decided to do two things.

1) form an ICS alumni association

2) lead the organization and planning to support the coding competition by providing mentors and prizes for… Continue

Added by aaron kagawa on August 18, 2008 at 11:31pm — No Comments

Asia's Social Web

One of the challenges presented by the joint US/Japan/China debut we are planning for ooi is the necessity of keeping our eye on three rapidly evolving markets. Although its time intensive, it is fascinating to observe the differences in each country. As Scott observed in the …

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Added by Daniel Leuck on August 18, 2008 at 6:00pm — 6 Comments

Social Networks, Anonymity, Reputation & Aloha

Last night I was chatting with Laurel and the guys from

Chi.mp about online identities and anonymity. I had a similar discussion with

Roxanne Darling about profile pics. Social network mediators are often faced with… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on August 17, 2008 at 7:30pm — 13 Comments

FADE

Fade

I see them fading, in and out. Must be the heat and the distance. My eyes aren’t what they used to be.

It was hot, but oddly, not humid. The two soldiers in sun faded tropical fatigues stood on the ridgeline; they were motionless. Their web gear was unbuckled and hung loose around their hips. Likewise, their hands hung empty; no weapons were slung from their shoulders. They were unarmed. The one on the right was tall… Continue

Added by Dave Takaki on August 17, 2008 at 1:53pm — No Comments

Adobe ConnectNow: Free Web Conferencing

Running a small web based software-as-a-service (SAAS) company, most of my customer contact is via the web (website forms and email). Only a select few of my customers actually have my telephone number. However, it's high time to add web conferencing and video as a means of improving communication with customers. If pictures speak a thousand words, perhaps video speaks ten thousand. In the past, I've researched… Continue

Added by Truman Leung on August 13, 2008 at 4:00pm — 5 Comments

PBN Book of Lists (Web Design) - Analyzed...

On Friday, Pacific Business News published their list of Web Designers, it is always so interesting to take a more in-depth look at the details to see what they really mean. The list is quite deceiving as it is ranked by annual revenue without regard for the percentage of revenue actually generated by web services. So for instance if Hawaiian Airlines decided they were going to give their Hawaii bound travelers a website to post vacation photos and a forum to blog on their favorite places… Continue

Added by Rob Bertholf on August 12, 2008 at 3:00pm — 5 Comments