Last week we made the basic WCF service, based on the template from VS2010.  A set of defaults that can be built on.  To make your own service, the assumption would be to make another interface, implement it, and then copy the app.config.  For the most part, that is correct.  What is less obvious is where those values come from, and what do they mean.  This week we will create our own service, and modify the app.config to expose it.  Everything we will do this week builds on the project from…

Windows Communication Foundation is a framework for building service-oriented applications.  Over the next several weeks, I intend to write about WCF and share some of my experience working with it.  This specific post covers a very simple getting started scenario.  It does not assume you know anything about WCF, or have ever seen it before.  It is a step-by-step guide to creating a service and a test case for it.  I do assume that you have a version of VS2010 that includes the test…

Over the past year, the City and County of Honolulu and Code for America pushed to make the city's data open to the public. The city has a tight budget and can only dedicate a small amount of resources to the creation of applications using this data, so opening it up allows people in the community to work with this data. Recently, they published a list of their available datasets …

When Mika and I started Ikayzo seven years ago I got everything wrong. Because I enjoyed a good relationship with my previous two employers I was confident they would become my first customers. Surely I could easily sell to local companies as well. Although we were a new company, I had a solid software development resume and some experience with business development. I thought recruiting would be easy because we could offer the ability to do interesting work in paradise. I…

MVC, MVP, and MVVM are some of the common patterns to guide programmers toward creating decoupled solutions.  Learning about these is not a trivial task, picking the one that is best for a specific problem is a challenge, and implementing it correctly based on the descriptions I found on the internet would be even more challenging.  I have gone back and pulled out the earliest references I could find to these patterns for the definitions and explanations, but then put them in a modern…

Okay, so actually I'm very impressed with what enterprising coders have been able to do with fantastic libraries like NodeJS, PhantomJS, JQuery, mootools, etc.  They've take away a lot of the pain and to them I'm very grateful.  Making javascript work more in the fashion of other ECMA standard…

About a year ago, inspired by the legendary Aloha on Rails, a Ruby on Rails conference organized by Seth Ladd in 2009, a bunch of regulars at a local Honolulu Ruby user group aloha.rb (http://www.meetup.com/aloharb/) decided to organize another Hawaii Ruby conference in 2012. After a lot of hard work, Aloha Ruby Conf (http://aloharubyconf.com/) is…

It was with a heavy heart that we gave notice to our friends at the Manoa Innovation Center yesterday. Its time for Ikayzo to graduate to a larger commercial space. We are excited about having a new office, but we will miss the MIC community and our corporate home tucked away in beautiful Manoa valley.

Ikayzo has been at the …

It always seems like we have more to do than hours in a day -- waves of work demands, constant family obligations and a cacophony of phone calls, emails, texts and reminders. Amidst this overload, it’s increasingly hard to focus on the things that are important to us and give them the level of attention, passion and creativity we’d like. Here are some basic guides I’ve found helpful for creating the mental space for making smart choices on what to pay attention to and getting these things…

The topics I have been selecting to write about are a reflection of things that have come up over the previous week.  The topic this week is logging.  Logging is an extremely valuable tool when developing and debugging software.  It can make the difference between a thirty second scan of a text file and several hours of debugging.  Given the importance of logging there have been at least a few attempts at creating logging applications.  Log4xxx type loggers have tons of neat features.  As…

connascence

= con (e.g. together) + nascence (e.g. birth or coming into existence)

= to come into existence together as well as to change together, to die together

= a useful concept for writing maintainable…

The use of "includes(:association_name)" in rails is a widely accepted rails best practice to prevent n + 1 queries in your views. If you aren't sure what either of those mean check out the ruby on rails guide about eager loading associations.  When you are retrieving a collection of…

There are several interesting research projects going on in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) at UH Manoa, ranging from social network analysis to continuous data processing for mobile applications. Being a recent Master's in computer science graduate, I've heard about many of these projects directly from the professors. While I encourage you to read more about them on the…

Web Site Security Tips

When developing web sites it’s a good practice to address security from the start.  Here are some basic security tips that I find many sites overlook.

1. Use different passwords for your server, database, FTP and other logins.  I am often surprised to find many sites that use the same admin password for all their systems or use the same default password without forcing a password…

We use Heroku, a PaaS (Platform as a Service) vendor, quite often for hosting small and medium-sized web applications. It makes it drop-dead simple to install, deploy, maintain, and scale your projects on Amazon AWS's infrastructure. Being a fully managed service, they also take care of ongoing hardware and OS-level maintenance, and have engineers around-the-clock monitoring and responding to infrastructure emergencies. Furthermore, they…

A team that includes three co-founders from Bump Networks on Maui is about to launch FlikDate, a nifty looking mobile video dating app. They got covered in TechCrunch three weeks ago!

It's kinda like ChatRoulette but uses FBConnect for signups, so people are less likely to act badly (and they can be easily tracked and bounced). The monetization…

I know "Microsoft" is not the first word that comes mind when you're writing a ruby application but since Google dropped the free tier for their translation service the Microsoft Translator API is a good alternative for a small/personal project that you don't want to have to bother with the monthly bill.  

Recently I've had to use this API in a project and this weekend I extracted the functionality out into a simple gem.  I present to you 'microsoft_translator'  (queue…

(Note: This post originally appeared on Aloha Startups, but it's important to get everyone in Hawaii's tech community weighing in on this topic. Please add your comments and continue the conversation. Also, if you have thoughts about Hawaii's first accelerator, which was recently announced, email Rechung Fujihira with your ideas.)

Seems like every other person I talk with has a plan for a local incubator…

In recent years smartphones have become part of many people's daily lives.  They are used to communicate, stay updated, take photos, listen to music and entertain us with hundreds of thousands of apps. People carry their cellphones around with them wherever they go.  They wake up with them, eat with them and go to bed with them.  



For companies this presents another opportunity to market and reach out to customers.  If you or your company is considering a mobile presence there are…

Earlier this year I was conducting a training class on programming and found I needed to provide trainees with some models for evaluating the maturity of a  technological concept, device, or platform. One such model that stuck with me over the years is Gartner Research's Hype Curve Model. If you are not familiar with them, Gartner is a technology research firm composed of independent analysts based around the world. Their Hype Curve Model…