Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Featured Blog Posts (422)

Featured Techie: Pipeline CTO Dr. Seri Lee

What do Game Boxes, Graphics Cards, Blade Servers, Lasers, Concentrated Photovoltaics and High Power LEDs all have in common? They all get WAY too hot. Thus, these technologies have significant potential to benefit from Pipeline Micro's patented micro-scale liquid cooling systems. How does Pipeline compete in this space with mainland and Japanese firms? They hire their best engineers. In a year… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 2, 2009 at 4:30pm — No Comments

Act 221 -- Uncertainty Not Good For Anyone

The buzz I've been hearing from everyone in the VC and startup community is that the uncertainty over the fate of Act 221 has frozen all investments in tech companies in Hawaii. That's because no one can responsibly estimate a proper investment amount or strategy without a clear sense of the tax implications. Eliminating Act 221 entirely would actually be better than leaving the matter in limbo any longer. I am not saying that saving or killing Act 221 is good one way or the other -- both sides… Continue

Added by Alex Salkever on June 1, 2009 at 7:47pm — 5 Comments

Rails Training Added to Aloha on Rails

I'm really excited to announce that the Aloha on Rails Conference has added Rails Training to the program. This professional training is brought to you by RailsBridge, the outreach and advocacy group chartered to create an inclusive and friendly Ruby on Rails community.

This Rails Training in Paradise is designed specifically for… Continue

Added by Seth Ladd on May 27, 2009 at 10:06am — No Comments

The Three Horse Advanced Web UI Race

During this trip I had the opportunity to chat with a customer about bringing a complex financial desktop application to the web. For this type of application the options we look at are Flex, GWT and Silverlight. All three technologies are capable of producing rich, desktop-like UIs. All are backed by software giants (Adobe, Google and Microsoft respectively.) A good team of… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on May 25, 2009 at 1:30pm — 5 Comments

Finally a lengthy news article on Twitter in Hawaiʻi

Pacific Business News has a surprisingly long article on the use of Twitter by businesses in Hawaiʻi.

The article also provides a list of Hawaiʻi businesses that have Twitter accounts. An attempt to get us to follow them? Maybe.

I appreciate Roxanne Darlingʻs advice, "that doesn’t mean letting the chattiest employees tweet about their lunch choices." Often… Continue

Added by Derek on May 22, 2009 at 4:44pm — No Comments

HOWTO: Get started with LDAP

I've heard many times about LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), yet never had the time to experiment with this technology. Somehow I always thought it was for those 'cool' developers, who actually had the opportunity to spend extra hours researching this topic. Well, the time has also come for me to enter the 'cool' club :)

Wikipedia was a good place to start, though it only gave me… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on May 21, 2009 at 4:30pm — No Comments

Blogging in Japan

With 37% of the world's blog posts being in Japanese, its surprising that few people outside the country know it has the

largest and

most active blogging culture in the world. Blogging has also become a crucial social media tool in Japan, as in the US, for individuals and businesses to promote their services and products. Blogs in Japan take on different shapes and… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on May 20, 2009 at 12:30pm — 3 Comments

Web Companies Can Still Have Successful IPOs

Online restaurant reservation system provider OpenTable is up 40% from its $20 initial offering price on its first day of trading. This puts the company's market cap at a healthy $605 million. This is good news for tech entrepreneurs and VCs swimming in news of doom and gloom. OpenTable recieved $48M in venture backing over three rounds.

More on… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on May 21, 2009 at 9:00am — 3 Comments

Tech Community Tithe

Recent 221 debates have highlighted an issue that has been simmering for many years in our community. There is a perception that the tech crowd is a a group of elitist "haves" who care nothing for those who are not part of our clique. This type of dynamic is very dangerous, and can quickly degrade into an emotional place where intelligent discourse is impossible. Some of this is our fault. I know many of you… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on May 16, 2009 at 2:00pm — 5 Comments

Hello, World!

My name is Sebastian Bozlee, and I'm a student at Castle High School.This is my first blog here at Tech Hui. I've been programming by myself for a while, and I hope to find others interested in it. My latest and greatest program is a buzzword compliant, XML-configurable, ray-tracing, 3D renderer written in C++ with support for .bmp textures, spheres, and planes. I've been developing it with Cygwin. Hopefully I can get it compiling for Windows and Linux soon. Here's a picture: …

Continue

Added by Sebastian Bozlee on May 16, 2009 at 8:31am — 7 Comments

INVENTION CONTEST FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY IN HAWAII

I’ve wondered why, with our HCEI goal to convert from 90% foreign oil dependency to 70% renewable energy use by 2030, there have not been more Hawaii companies working on innovations in renewable energy. As my own innovation stimulus, I am offering this INVENTION CONTEST for anyone to come up with new, useful and nonobvious solutions to the following 3 invention starter ideas. The winner in each category will be announced on my blog site and receive my coveted “GOLDEN BAGEL AWARD” for best… Continue

Added by Leighton K. Chong on May 5, 2009 at 7:30am — 6 Comments

Code Moding (Bugger Off)

I've noticed that certain activities such as designing systems, writing code and writing music put me in a very particular mental state. As this is a tech blog, I'll call it "code mode". Code mode is characterized by a hyper-focused state, a diminished sense of the passing of time and annoyance at any interruption. Its great for productivity, but isn't very practical in a typical office environment… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on May 10, 2009 at 7:00pm — 30 Comments

Fail: A Laptop Theft gone bad - is Lo-Jack still necessary?

I just thought I'd mention it because I thought the story was funny.

I listened to the May 1, 2009, Geek News Central Podcast hosted by Hawai'i's Todd Cochrane.

From what I can remember of the story, basically, a guy stole another person's laptop. The person whose laptop got stolen, remotely accessed his computer and… Continue

Added by Derek on May 6, 2009 at 9:17am — 5 Comments

(Tech) Businesses and the Law

I've been wanting to write this particular blog posting for quite some time, but just got too busy at times to write it. When I wasn't too busy, I was often just too tired. Now, thanks to some "lifestyle" changes, I'm still busy but I feel motivated to finally sit down and write this blog entry.

As a law school graduate I subscribe to a number of American Bar Association magazines. One of my favorites is Business Law Today. The… Continue

Added by Derek on May 5, 2009 at 12:30am — 3 Comments

Featured Scientist: Transgenesis Guru Stefan Moisyadi

I recently had the pleasure of meeting molecular biologist Stefan Moisyadi at one of Jay Fidel's ThinkTech meetings. During the meeting, and at lunch, we discussed topics ranging from mammalian transgenesis and microbubble drug delivery systems to the current political climate in Turkey and the proper way to make baklava. Every conversation with… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on April 29, 2009 at 9:30am — 3 Comments

Tech Resumes & Interviews

I hope you are all enjoying this beautiful weekend. Over the past few weeks we've received a number of questions about writing resumes and performing well in technical interviews. I thought it best to summarize our advice in a short blog post. Other employers are welcome to contribute.

Resumes

1. Show an interest in the company to which you are applying. Write a cover letter that describes why you are interested in that particular company, and why they should be… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on April 25, 2009 at 10:00am — 6 Comments

Learning from Failure, or There Goes My Golden Week Vacation

As a systems architect, I must concern myself with project management issues. Every now and then, I like to check my head and reread a wonderful blog post from Reg Braithwaite on What I've learned from failure. I printed up a copy and keep it in my notebook so that I can pull it out and read it on my train ride.

This is a timely topic for me as I now… Continue

Added by Brooke Fujita on April 22, 2009 at 4:05pm — 5 Comments

The World Digital Library is Now Online!

I've always liked UNESCO's homepages such as http://whc.unesco.org. One of my hobbies is traveling. I often check

UNESCO's world heritage site before I go traveling to foreign countries. Now

the World Digital Library is online! We don't need to visit the libraries in… Continue

Added by Mika Leuck on April 21, 2009 at 6:00pm — 4 Comments

HOWTO: Create a simple Groovlet

This post is for those who've heard about Serlvets and Groovy, but just don't have the time to put them together. Being no guru, I've developed a number of JSPs and Servlets in my professional carrier. Every time it is the same thing.. remembering method signatures, xml descriptors, etc.. It gets even worse if you want a Servlet to print out HTML content. Let's just put it this way - Java is not designed for simple Web development. There is always the JSP approach, which is still… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on April 21, 2009 at 5:30pm — 1 Comment

The things I don't like about Mixi

Mixi is the largest social network in Japan. With a lot of my friends in Japan, I can't help but use Mixi, but if I had a choice, I would convince my friends to switch to a different social networking platform like Facebook. Here is why.

Mixi Acitivity/Visited Log

Mixi has a feature that displays exactly who visited your page or blog. It sounds cool and you might think it encourages activity but to me, it's annoying because when I read my friend's blog, it leaves me… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on April 17, 2009 at 1:22pm — 5 Comments