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…

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…

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…

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…

Following on from the November election there has been renewed talk about visa reform, and three parts of the discussion are relevant to our tech community here in Hawaii.  Proposed actions include easing visa requirements for international graduates in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) fields, creating a new “Start-Up Visa” for entrepreneurs, and raising the quota for H-1B…

UH Information Technology Services (ITS) is once again hosting the "Techs in Paradise" (TIP) series of technical networking workshops & meetings in January 2013 at the East West Center.  TIP 2013 brings together hundreds of participants from both the Internet2 and Asia Pacific Advanced Networking (APAN) communities, along with ESNet.  This is the only time these groups from East and West meet together; UH hosted previous TIP events in 2001, 2004 & 2008.  …

Should US and EU regulators step in to curb the search giant's influence? 

In one of the worst editorials on CNN this year Andrew Keen, a man who once compared the social web to a "communist…

Contrary to what the title may lead you to believe about me, I'm not against the process of wireframing. I think it can be a very valuable tool in the designers kit when used properly. However, with more and more clients requesting increasingly complex functionality from their sites and apps, wireframes simply fall short in conveying the most important part of an interface design: how it will behave.

This really…

Henk Rogers has launched a new Hawaii-based venture accelerator called Blue Startups focusing on capital-efficient and scalable-technology companies, including Internet, software, mobile, gaming and e-commerce. They are also interested in tech companies selling into Asian markets.

I'm excited to see Henk and friends making this sort of investment in our…

Christmas is coming, and nobody needs to tell you that malls are about to get crazy. The last thing you want to endure is long checkout lines – especially when you have a loooong gift list to get through.

Retailers don’t want you to wait either, because they’re afraid you may want to change your mind about that merchandise in your hand. Thank goodness, then, for…

Recently I was asked if Microsoft constitutes a good investment today. Talk about a loaded question! First of all, please consider the commentary here as just a small piece of what you will consider when making your decision. Investments in general involve the much bigger picture of your risk tolerance, risk profile, financial goals, and existing assets. Having said…

I've been meaning to follow up on Chris Sass' excellent post on growing pains.  A related side effect of code that has grown too complicated is unit tests that are impossible to decipher.  As your ActiveRecord model becomes bloated, the tests written for it have to mock out too many things.  This makes it nearly impossible to know why the test was created and what, exactly, is supposed…

HPU captured first place in the Hawaii site of this year's ACM International Programming contest, for the second year in a row. HPU's winning team placed 19th out of 111 teams in the Pacific Northwest Region, an impressive feat.



Winning team: Kevin Goo, Kenneth Chai, Kwok Cheung (four problems solved)

2nd place team: Jarred Jobe, Melvin Tomas, Jessia Soriano (three problems solved)

4th place team: Precious Binas, Abe Pineda, Nathaniel Befus (three problems solved)…

This week, I'm deleting lots of my code.

This is actually a pretty common occurrence for me. In this case, a UI pattern that I came up with for a project works well in the small, but doesn't scale up. Other times, I've worked on a chunk of code and revisited it enough times that its structure was no longer clear, and the cognitive effort of remembering all its inconsistencies significantly outweighed the benefit of keeping it. Every once in a while I'll have thought of a better way to…

A few weeks ago Microsoft released a preview for TypeScript.  What is TypeScript and why would you use it?  Initially TypeScript may look very similar in function to CoffeeScript or Dart.  These are two technologies TypeScript often gets compared to because all three can be used to generate JavaScript.…

If you have been part of building an application that has lasted longer than a month then you've probably had some troubles as the project grows.   Business logic requirements get more and more complicated.  Features change direction.  You occasionally "hack" something just to satisfy a release or an urgent bug fix, saying "I can refactor/clean this up this later..."

Then one day "later..." is now.  New features are getting harder and harder to implement.  Everything seems intricately…

WCF is a framework for building service-oriented applications.  The flexibility of the framework makes it very powerful, but that power requires some wisdom in the implementation.  In this post, there will not be many answers, but I hope to help you determine what questions to ask.

Sharing assemblies between the server and the client

Many developers like to do things such as override ToString().  Not surprisingly, that code will not survive being sent over WCF.  It is…