Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

All Blog Posts (799)

Mobile Barcodes Makes Purchasing Goods Easy

More Details: Mobile barcodes are on the verge of becoming a global phenomenon, but what exactly are they, what do they do, and for whom? We became familiar with the original, linear barcodes (or 1D), from our supermarket shopping in the 1980’s (although the technology was patented in the 1950’s). They comprise a series of vertical black lines and white spaces… Continue

Added by GenePhillips on April 9, 2008 at 4:00pm — 5 Comments

Hacking BeanShell with JavaCC - Building a Language

A few months ago

Clifton Royston posted an excellent entry titled

Recursive descent parsing with BNF grammars. This inspired me to write about

JavaCC, my favorite parser generator. Today I finally got around to putting together some examples. Academic articles on parser generators and… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 31, 2008 at 3:30am — 1 Comment

interview with lynn fujioka

"Cross posted from http://kagawaa.blogspot.com"

i met Lynn last year and i can barely keep up with the millions of things that she does. the amazing thing is that nearly all of those things are for the betterment of the children of hawaii. and that is really awesome.

lynn is the executive director of isisHawaii. in this interview we learn much more about lynn, isisHawaii, her other organizations, and what really drives… Continue

Added by aaron kagawa on March 31, 2008 at 12:04am — 8 Comments

Paint Delegates in Java Swing and .NET WinForms

A few months back I blogged about an excellent Swing look and feel called

Nimbus. Nimbus is entirely vector based and does all its painting using delegates that can be layered and shared. Painters are used to draw tiled images, gradients, stripes, glass effects, etc. They also support Photoshop-like filters. Painter Example:

    MattePainter matte = new MattePainter(new Color(21, 21,…

Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 30, 2008 at 5:00pm — No Comments

A 15 Minute Intro to C# for Java Developers

Intro

This is a quick intro to C# for Java developers. Why should you care what those C# guys are doing? If you are a pragmatic developer you know its good to have a few languages in your toolbox. If you are a member of the anti-Microsoft crowd, think of it as a way to "keep your enemies closer." :-) The C# language features added to Java 5 make it clear Sun and the JCP are taking this approach.

C# is a very close relative of Java. Its inventor,… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 29, 2008 at 3:30pm — 2 Comments

Why is Google Losing in Russia and Asia?

Google handles 65% of all web searches in the US and 86% of all searches in the UK. Its advertising revenue for 2007 was twice that of its three closest competitors combined, up 44% over 2006. Google has 79% of the pay-per-click ad market and controls 40% of all online advertising. This dominance has largely translated to success in Western Europe and South America, but not Russia or Asia. Why?

Google is having a rough time in… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 26, 2008 at 2:00am — 1 Comment

Java Icon Format & API

After a month long hiatus from coding I decided to jump back in and finish a project I started a few years ago. Java has always lacked a proper icon format such as Window's

ICO and OS X's

ICNS. A modern icon format and API should support: 1. 32 bit color (ARGB) 2. Vector and bitmap images (multiple sizes for bitmaps) 3. Bundling of icon variants in… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 24, 2008 at 1:00pm — 5 Comments

Tipping Points in Social Networks

The science of social networks has always interested me, which is part of the reason I decided to launch TechHui. I often wonder what the tipping point is for this network. Have we already reached it? If I was hit by a bus tomorrow, would TechHui continue to be a viable social network a year from now? As we approach 200 members, and other active posters have started to appear, I believe the answer is yes, but this is just a gut feeling. What are the metrics? Do they differ for vertically… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 22, 2008 at 12:30pm — 15 Comments

iPhone in Japan, Thailand and Madagascar

Salama Folks! We are just back from a long trip that took us to Thailand, Madagascar, Maritius and Japan. Although it was an amazing trip and I would love to post here about all our great experiences, I don't want to get too far off topic. If you are interested in pics and stories please check out our Makinet ning site.

It was interesting to note the level of iPhone adoption in each country. I met two people with iPhones in Antananarivo,… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 21, 2008 at 8:30pm — No Comments

UH ICS and LIS Anniversary Lunch

(cross posted from http://kagawaa.blogspot.com/) on saturday, march 8th 2008 we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the University of Hawaii Information and Computer Sciences department. it was a great day for the department because it was the first time we had an alumni/department lunch in 40 years. hopefully, this will be the start to a lot more things from the department. more activities, events, fund raising, high school/intermediate expos, etc. i plan on helping and even leading the… Continue

Added by aaron kagawa on March 9, 2008 at 12:30am — 2 Comments

interview with ian kitajima

"Cross posted from http://kagawaa.blogspot.com"

interview with ian kitajima

ian is the leader of the dual use group: A grassroots industry group for Hawaii's defense and dual-use companies. he is also a marketing manager at oceanit.

ian is a really cool dude. i met at local business function after work. its kind of a classic networking example (which by the way is really really important in hawaii). from that meeting we worked on a few events… Continue

Added by aaron kagawa on March 4, 2008 at 1:14am — 1 Comment

funny spam

THE BENEFICIARY.

SCAM VICTIMS/$150,000 REIMBURSEMENT PAYMENTS

OUR REF: 10667FV

YOUR REF: 06654

ATTENTION,

U.N SCAM VICTIMS REIMBURSEMENT PROGRAMME.

I write to bring to your notice as a delegate from the Nigerian Government Reimbursement Committe under the strict supervision of the United Nations to pay 230 Nigerian 419 scam victims the sum of $150,000 USD (One Hundred and Fifty Thounsand Dollars) each. Priort investigation and internet database… Continue

Added by J. David Beutel on February 28, 2008 at 6:57pm — No Comments

Honolulu Coders meeting - Kevin Hughes on Sprout - Wed 6pm

Sprout CTO Kevin Hughes shares the lessons his team has learned in building a Flex-based, Powerpoint-type application. He'll discuss software architecture decisions, what makes a superior Flex developer, and notes on working with combinations of Flash, Java, Ruby, and PHP in a startup environment.

Kevin Hughes is an internationally-recognized pioneer in Web design and software, having made imagemap, which allowed Web images to be interactive, and contributions to the Cascading Style… Continue

Added by Sam Joseph on February 21, 2008 at 6:43am — 1 Comment

interview with daniel leuck

"Cross posted from http://kagawaa.blogspot.com"

interview with daniel leuck

Daniel Leuck is the President of Ikayzo, Inc. (http://www.ikayzo.com), he is by far the most knowledgeable developer that i know. dan is one of those developers that really really really really loves to hack. the thing that i admire about dan is that he shares that love for software development with others; it's infectious.

i was lucky to catch a few moments with dan. this is a short… Continue

Added by aaron kagawa on February 19, 2008 at 11:14pm — 1 Comment

Bonjour Madagascar!

Aloha TechHuians,

We are leaving for Madagascar on Monday. Mika and I are very excited! Two ninjas and a gun-happy Ukrainian body builder (old family friends) will be staying at our place, so don't get any funny ideas.

We hope other community members will blog in our absence. The rules are simple:

- Entries should be about technology

- Entries should be at least a few sentences long

- We don't allow blog… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 15, 2008 at 3:00pm — No Comments

Customs Wants Your Passwords

I just read a rather disturbing article on CNN about laptop searches at airports. It describes laptop searches of US citizens that include forcing people to provide passwords for files containing private personal and corporate data. I've run across similar articles on the BBC and in the Economist. These searches require no suspicion of wrongdoing. The CBP (… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 11, 2008 at 5:03pm — 5 Comments

Aku Shaper: Swing Surfboard Design

Local company

Aku Shaper has developed a great web start Swing app that allows you to model surfboards for production on their high precision Aku Shaper machine. The app is incredibly easy to use, even if you have no experience with 3D modeling tools. The GUI presents you with a bezier curve editor that has preset points placed only in the areas that make sense for a surf board's shape. After you shape your board in the curve editor Aku Shaper… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 9, 2008 at 7:24pm — 1 Comment

Web-based Photo Booth

Have you seen seenly.com? It is a flash site which prompts the user to allow the flash plug-in to access the user's webcam. Then the user can snap a photo of himself/herself which is then saved on the web.

This would be a great addition to any social networking or event management web app.

Any flash experts out there done something like this with flash in their web apps?

Added by Truman Leung on February 7, 2008 at 10:41pm — 3 Comments

In-Browser Code Editor

I just came across a fantastic piece of Javascript wizardry which would work great in the content management portion of my web app. It's an in-browser Javascript/HTML editor text editor called CodeMirror written by Marijn Haverbeke. The editor highlights code as well as auto-indents.

Check it out: CodeMirror.

Added by Truman Leung on February 4, 2008 at 8:52pm — 2 Comments

Tech Picks: John McCain and Barack Obama

Technology pundits from around the blogsphere are weighing in on the primaries. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame recently endorsed John McCain and… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 3, 2008 at 5:00pm — No Comments