Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Featured Blog Posts (422)

Hbase and EC2 for Google-like Search

I have built a SaaS company based on PHP and MySQL running on cPanel accounts with each customer running their own separate MySQL database. At some point I would like to create various applications for searching of data across customers. That's not possible right now because each customer is using a separate database.

I just discovered… Continue

Added by Truman Leung on March 17, 2009 at 8:30am — 1 Comment

The Nature of Genius

Have you ever met someone and thought, "Wow. He/she is Human 2.0"? There are some individuals who aren't just a little smarter than other people, they are playing in a whole different arena. My first experience with a person like this was a class I took from professor Moshe Lazar at USC. He spoke a dozen languages and had incredible insight on topics ranging from comparative theology and linguistics to mathematics and physics.… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 15, 2009 at 12:00pm — 21 Comments

Amazon EC2 cloud computing got much cheaper today...

Today Amazon introduced "reserved instance" pricing for users who tend to run long lived instances.

The usual pricing for a small instance is $0.10 per cpu-hour, which works out to about $73/month if you keep your instance alive 24x7.

With the reserved pricing you can pay a fixed amount for a term of 1 year or 3 years and get a reduced hourly usage rate of $.03 per cpu-hour For 1 year the up front fee is $325, for 3 years it's $500.

If you run your instance all… Continue

Added by Pat Niemeyer on March 12, 2009 at 11:42am — 4 Comments

HOWTO: Create your own Slide Show Gadget using WebAlbums and iGoogle API

Besides programming all day, I also like to take pictures. One problem, is that after taking cool pictures, I tend to forget about them.. Recently I had some time on my hands to dig into Google technologies, especially their GData and Gadget API. Since I am already using things like iGoogle, Picasa, and WebAlbums, I wondered how difficult is it to put these technologies together to create a simple Slide Show Gadget. So in this post, I would like to discuss how to create your own Slide Show… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on March 8, 2009 at 8:00pm — 6 Comments

Creative Blog Widgets in Japan

In my daily read of Japanese blogs, I come across some pretty cool blog widgets (or 'blog parts' as they are called in Japan). Here are some that I thought were pretty nifty:

Two Essential Widgets for Japanese Bloggers These first two widgets are very common and are used by many bloggers to analyze/promote their website. If you plan to start a blog in Japanese, I would highly recommend them.

Awasete… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on March 5, 2009 at 11:09pm — 6 Comments

Managing Software Developers Across Borders

Globalization is leading to more and more geographically distributed software development teams. Online outsource marketplaces such as eLance,

Rent a Coder and

Guru are enabling small and medium size businesses to leverage offshore development resources for the first time. Macroeconomic trends are causing an increasing number of large businesses to look… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 5, 2009 at 9:00am — 7 Comments

Featured Scientist: Author / Entrepreneur / Biofuel Innovator Adelheid Kuehnle

"Kuehnle AgroSystems’ mission is to be the seed source of elite algae for the world's developing biofuels and bioproducts industries."

Kuehnle AgroSystems CEO Adelheid Kuehnle is bringing a new business paradigm to the biofuel and bioproduct industries. Instead of creating a few algae strain products marketed to wide verticals, Kuehnle is able to tailor strains to specific… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 2, 2009 at 8:00pm — 5 Comments

Is Direct RIA the next Big Thing in Web development?

Being an open source web developer for the last 10 years, I have probably tried most of open source web related technologies out there in some flavor. It all started with good old HTML. To make a long story short, now web arena is populated with things like JSP, JSTL, JSF, etc.. and notably GWT. Even though JSP is still going to stick around, GWT revolutionized my development toolbox by introducing pure Java to the world of JavaScript. Some also like to call it JavaScript hell. It is true,… Continue

Added by Konstantin A Lukin on February 28, 2009 at 5:30pm — 2 Comments

iPhone for Everyone in Japan

One of Japan's largest cellphone carriers, Softbank Mobile just announced a new iPhone campaign called 'iPhone for Everyone'. With this new offer valid until late May, you can get an 8gb iPhone for

free (yup, 0 yen) or a 16gb iPhone for about $100 with a 2 year contract. The iPhone was released in Japan in July of 2008 and although it generated a ton of buzz, shortly after its release I started reading about …

Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on February 25, 2009 at 9:30pm — 5 Comments

Browser SSL attacks presented at Black Hat...

Moxie Marlinspike gave a presentation titled: "New Tricks for Defeating SSL in Practice" at the Black Hat conference last week and released code that demonstrates practical, man in the middle based, attacks on browser security.

The results are a bit depressing, but not entirely new or unexpected. The attacks that he presented in the talk mostly skirt around SSL and while they… Continue

Added by Pat Niemeyer on February 24, 2009 at 5:57am — 5 Comments

A End to End Walk through our Java Stack...

In this post I will take a walk through our preferred Java application stack from end to end, noting what I consider to be some useful practices along the way. While it's a never ending process to re-evaluate packages and tools as time goes on, I have found that this basic architecture has held up quite well for many years. We've used it on numerous large commercial applications ranging from critical banking and finance apps to high volume entertainment sites. I'm not going to try to… Continue

Added by Pat Niemeyer on February 22, 2009 at 1:10pm — 10 Comments

Let GM Die

Better Companies with Better Technology Will Rise from the Ashes GM and Chrysler are back at our doorstep, hats in hand, asking for a bailout that could

exceed $130 billion. We should say, "No, and shame on you for asking!" GM is failing because of horrible mismanagement, a complete lack of long term planning, outdated technology and the fact that they make, by and large, high… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 18, 2009 at 9:00pm — 14 Comments

The Simple Declarative Language

Aloha TechHuians. Last month I blogged about the

SDL/Swing UI framework, which makes heavy use of the

Simple Declarative Language (SDL.) I came up with the idea for SDL about six years ago when I was buried in a mess of XML J2EE config files. It struck me that XML is great for things like marking up… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 16, 2009 at 7:00pm — No Comments

"Advocacy-Made-Easy" Tool

Aloha TechHuians,

Now that we are in the midst of another legislative session, I thought it appropriate to let you all know of a new "advocacy-made-easy" tool that helps politically-motivated individuals and advocacy groups get their friends, members or constituents to very easily submit testimony via a pre-populated web form. Once set-up it takes folks 30 seconds or less to get their voices heard.

The tool is called the Hawaii Policy Portal and can be found at… Continue

Added by Kevin Vaccarello on February 11, 2009 at 10:01am — 21 Comments

Why doesn't Microsoft learn?

In this morning's headlines I came across the following pair of articles:

Apple to Integrate 'QuickTime Pro' Features into Snow Leopard?

Average User Only Runs 2 Apps, So Microsoft Will Charge for More

The first is about how Apple, as part of the upcoming release of… Continue

Added by Pat Niemeyer on February 9, 2009 at 5:41am — 5 Comments

The Psychological Barrier to SaaS

Two months ago we moved our last customer still running their own email server to Google applications. As we have seen with our other customers, there was a short stressful period as they adjusted, followed by great satisfaction as they moved from using Outlook to Gmail's web UI. It starts with one or two employees discovering the power of live collaboration on spreadsheets or simple document sharing. They become internal evangelists, and pretty soon the whole organization is realizing… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 8, 2009 at 7:30pm — 14 Comments

Simpler and Speedier GWT with Server Side RPC Serialization

In this post I will describe how we are using server side GWT RPC serialization at Ikayzo to both improve performance and simplify client code logic.

First, let's have a quick recap of the normal startup sequence of a GWT application. As depicted below, it begins with the client requesting an HTML page containing a GWT script reference and static application text. All that is required in this initial page is a one line script that includes the GWT application's "nocache" file.… Continue

Added by Pat Niemeyer on February 4, 2009 at 5:30am — 9 Comments

Analytics that tells you Gender-Age Demographics

I came across a pretty interesting stats program called user insight in Japan that was recently released by UserLocal who are also the creators of Japan's cell phone analytics program ugokuhito and nakanohito.

At first glance, user insight looked pretty normal. Heat maps, page views, gender analysis...wait gender analysis? Yeah, apparently this product… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on November 24, 2008 at 10:30pm — 6 Comments

Twitter Gets Serious

Twitter traffic is reaching such huge volume it is becoming statistically accurate and contains so much real-time data that it is becoming relevant. Like a survey, the larger the sample the more accurate the conclusions, so if 500 Twitterer's are giving real time information about a large-scale event the cumulative data can prove very precise.

This new source of data and it's accurary have not gone unnoticed by California authorities who used it to track the recent brush fires in… Continue

Added by Keith Rollman on November 20, 2008 at 4:41pm — 7 Comments

Social Networks, Anonymity, Reputation & Aloha

Last night I was chatting with Laurel and the guys from

Chi.mp about online identities and anonymity. I had a similar discussion with

Roxanne Darling about profile pics. Social network mediators are often faced with… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on August 17, 2008 at 7:30pm — 13 Comments