Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Featured Blog Posts (422)

Hybrid Native / Web Apps

We just finished a very interesting hybrid application called Ilio Fun Facts for the Army Corps of Engineers (mahalo to Native Hawaiian Veterans for pulling us in on the project.) The project provides free MacBooks to a group of public grade schools in Waianae. The MacBooks have special logins and screensavers that help educate kids about unexploded ordnance. In addition to being technically interesting it was one of those projects that makes you feel good because it helps the community.… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on January 12, 2010 at 7:30pm — 6 Comments

What Was Your Favorite Project?

About 15 years ago (I'm terrible with dates) I was working with my old friend

Brent Ridenour on a software project in the Bay Area. During that time Brent lent me a book on

knot theory that reinvented my view of mathematics. I found the whole concept of… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on December 31, 2009 at 2:00pm — 5 Comments

Featured Techie: Haralds Jass, Founder and CEO of Superb Internet, Hawaii's Largest Web Hosting Company

In January 2009, Superb Internet Corp. relocated to Honolulu from Vancouver, Canada lock, stock and barrel. The Internet hosing and technology services company had decided to leave Canada for a number of reasons bu the move was a surprise to many in Hawaii. The traditional pattern for technology companies in the islands is launch small, grow to a larger size then leave. And the traditional reasons cited for leaving are usually cost of operating a business in Hawaii, lack of qualified… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on December 27, 2009 at 1:30pm — 15 Comments

Finally...

It's been a rough semester (I had to pull 4 all nighters this week), but we have finally finished a prototype of our game for my school's Demo Day presentation!

The game is called Poggle, and it's for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It's a difficult game to describe. In some ways, it's like a real-time "Rock Paper Scissor" game. The best feature (and one of the more complicated) is that it can… Continue

Added by Sherwin Gao on December 16, 2009 at 1:00pm — 4 Comments

TechHui Meta Contest

Aloha TechHuians. As part of our initiative to grow the TechHui community, we are announcing what is, to our knowledge, the world's first meta-contest. This is a contest to come up with a clever contest :-) The winner of the meta-contest will have their choice of two months of free top level sponsorship (see the Sponsors area to the right) on the TechHui site, a $998 value, or the new… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on December 15, 2009 at 1:30pm — 43 Comments

Hawaii's Feed-In Tariff: More Information Needed, Pronto - Big Backers Like Hawaii But Need Details, Economics

In my time working on the U.S. Mainland (I'm splitting time there now between SF and HNL), I've been talking to a lot of top-tier venture capitalists, energy project financiers, and investment bankers involved in green energy. After finding out that I was from Hawaii, a number of them have asked me about the state's new Feed-In Tariff. They wanted detailed information so that they could see if clean energy projects in Hawaii might pencil out. Sadly, I had to tell them that the FIT at present… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on December 6, 2009 at 10:11am — 1 Comment

Renewable Energy Permitting

Sent to us by Jim Thompson:

There was a conference call this morning with representatives of the Hawaii Science and Technology Council, the UH Energy Policy Forum, the Farm Bureau, Senator Carol Fukunaga's Renewable Energy Sub-Group, Sun Fuels on the Big Island, and Pacific Bio-Fuel on Maui.

There was unanimous concensus to forward the attached package…

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Added by Daniel Leuck on December 3, 2009 at 1:00pm — No Comments

TechHui Featured Techie of the Month - Darren Kimura, CEO of Sopogy and Confirmed Energy Geek

Darren T. Kimura is an energy geek. While still in college he founded his first-energy related business, a consultancy focused on helping businesses conserve power and save money. He launched that business out of a the back of a beat-up Chevy Blazer. Today, Kimura is a top executive of two of Hawaii's most prominent energy companies, …

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Added by Alex Salkever on November 30, 2009 at 8:30am — 5 Comments

Framework for Developing a Statewide Innovation Plan

Posted on Behalf of the

High Technology Development Corporation From HTDC CEO

Yuka Nagashima: HTDC started working on this document in anticipation of the State's need to have a coherent implementation plan for establishing Hawaii's innovation economy last year. This document evolved as we also accommodated the needs of other economic development practitioners and industry… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on November 13, 2009 at 11:00am — 6 Comments

Google Go

I just read through the language spec and memory model for Go, Google's new language (thank you for the link Scott.) There are a lot of things l like about the language, such as its approach to concurrency, heavy use of type inference (which we also see in C# and Java 7), ruby-like array and map manipulation syntax, etc., but I'm not entirely sold on the type system. Go has no… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on November 11, 2009 at 2:00am — 21 Comments

Featured Techie: Seth Ladd, Organizer of Aloha on Rails Conference and Ruby on Rails Guru

On October 5th, the

"Aloha on Rails" Conference kicked off at the

Marriott Waikiki Hotel. The event was one of the top

Ruby on Rails regional conferences in 2009. These conferences bring together practitioners of and experts in Ruby on Rails, a software development framework that has become increasingly popular in the world of… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on November 6, 2009 at 7:30pm — 4 Comments

Howto manage Cron Jobs and Task Queues using Google AppEngine

In the process of discovering Google AppEngine's list of available features, I recently came across Cron Jobs and Task Queues. During my fairly extensive web development carrier, these terms always seemed like far away concepts that will not likely be a part of my average web development toolkit. At first, seeing these in AppEngine reminded me of those old mainframe systems that you read about in computer science manuals. One day I had some time to actually look into… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on October 26, 2009 at 5:00pm — No Comments

C# 4: Dynamic Types, Variance & Named Arguments

C# 4 adds some great features to what is already this language geek's favorite language. One of the overarching design goals of C# 4 is to be more dynamic. From the docs:

The major theme for C# 4.0 is dynamic programming. Increasingly, objects are “dynamic” in the sense that their structure and behavior is not captured by a static type, or at least not one that the compiler knows about when compiling your program.

Lets take a quick look at C# 4's… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 24, 2009 at 11:00am — 5 Comments

Community dynamics at Wikipedia: research done by the PARC - Augmented Social Cognition group

There's an interesting

post about the community dynamics of Wikipedia on the

PARC - Augmented Social Cognition site with several interesting ideas about Wikipedia and the maturation of a website community. This post concludes a four part series by summarizing work presented in a to-be-published paper by Bongwon Suh,… Continue

Added by Dan Starr on October 23, 2009 at 1:29pm — 2 Comments

Optimizing CSS with a simple Groovy script and CssTidy

Recently I've been working on a web project that requires quite an extensive CSS markup. Keeping it all in one file became unmanageable pretty quickly, so we've designed a way to split our styles into logical subdirectories with import statements, which is quite easily done with a css

@import tag. Here is an example of what a main file might look like:

@import 'common.css'; @import 'base.css';… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on October 15, 2009 at 2:00pm — 2 Comments

Building a Native OS X Desktop App: First Impressions

Not content to let Pat and Sherwin have all the fun with Cocoa development, I decided to dive in today. I just finished my first application. Its a simple note organizer for personal use I built to learn about OS X desktop development. Given the fact I'm new to the entire stack including… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 10, 2009 at 8:30pm — 40 Comments

The Web & Indigenous Cultures in Developing Countries

A few years ago the title of this post would have sounded bizarre, but its happening. From Fiji to Madagascar, we are observing the affect of web access on indigenous cultures. 99% of web access in these countries is by the wealthy few, but in some villages children walk hours to schools lucky enough to have a web connection. Village chiefs in Fiji often have mobile phones, and last month Vodafone Fiji starting offering iPhone. This will undoubtedly make web access in villages more… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on October 1, 2009 at 10:00am — 9 Comments

TechHui Featured Techie of the Month - Kim Binsted, Human Factors Expert, ICS Rockstar, and Intrepid Mars Simulator

Some geeks live in the lab. Others live on an entirely different planet - like Mars. Well, almost like Mars. Meet

Kim Binsted, our featured Techie of the Month. Kim is an associate professor at the University of Hawaii's Information and Computer Sciences(ICS) department. Binsted is also a co-investigator at the

UH-NASA Astrobiology Institute. She… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on September 29, 2009 at 8:00pm — 7 Comments

How Do We Best Support an Innovation Economy?

Aloha TechHui Members:

We would like to hear your opinion on this important issue for tech companies in Hawaii. After passage of Bill 199 restrictions on Act 221 tax credits in the last Legislative session, what legislative measures do you support to make investment capital for funding tech companies available in the next Legislative session in January 2010. Please take a few moments to fill out the… Continue

Added by Leighton K. Chong on September 21, 2009 at 4:30pm — 5 Comments

Localization in GWT using i18nCreator

I'm currently working on a GWT project for a large international company, so I've been spending some time before I really get too far into it to learn how to make this less painful to translate into multiple languages. I've found that GWT makes this a pretty simple task as long as you start with a little planning. Here I'm going to demonstrate the simplest possible example of localization, but I hope that it will be clear enough to explain how simple this is to accomplish and to maybe spare the… Continue

Added by Stephen McMahon on September 16, 2009 at 9:54pm — 1 Comment