Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Daniel Leuck's Blog (146)

3G iPhone Nice, But Still Missing Key Features

This week the blog featured several good iPhone 3G posts. Finally the wait it over. The most important improvements are 3G network support, GPS, support for third party apps, Exchange push support and a significant price cut. These are all great, but I can't believe we still don't have basic features like cut, copy and paste. I wonder if this is because they haven't figured out how to reconcile text selection with the fact that click and drag gestures… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 9, 2008 at 6:30pm — No Comments

AJAX Shells: Goosh!

A few months ago I ran across an AJAX interactive Ruby interpreter that really impressed me. It is an actual, working Ruby interpreter with an AJAX help system triggered by certain commands. If you type "help" followed by a number it will display the chapter's content in the area below the interpreter.

Today,… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 6, 2008 at 7:30pm — No Comments

TechHui Passes 300 Members

With the addition of TechHuian Stephen McMahon, we have passed the 300 member mark. TechHui has become a reflection of Hawaii's vibrant and substantial technology community. Working with other TechHuians to build this online community has been, and continues to be, a fantastic adventure. We've discovered people all over the state working on fascinating technology projects. As I stated in response to an… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on May 31, 2008 at 6:58pm — 2 Comments

Featured Techie: Henk Rogers

Henk Rogers

I met Henk about ten years ago just after he moved from Japan to Hawaii. He had a lot of fantastic stories about his adventures in Russia and Japan, and was full of ideas about what he wanted to accomplish in the gaming industry. His energy was contagious. Last month I enjoyed chatting with Henk over lunch about iLovePhotos, …

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Added by Daniel Leuck on May 27, 2008 at 12:03pm — No Comments

Featured Digital Artist: GB Hajim

Note: This article is cross-posted from the new

Digital Artists group.

The front page of TechHui has featured the work of Big Island CG wizard GB Hajim since its inception last year. In addition to his work on the 29th century feature film …

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Added by Daniel Leuck on May 8, 2008 at 11:30am — No Comments

Hacking BeanShell with JavaCC (Continued)

We will ease into the second part of this series (see Hacking BeanShell with JavaCC - Building a Language, Part 1) with a relatively simple task: implementing a "<>" equivalence operator. This operator calls .equals on its operands and handles nulls on either side. The first step is adding the operator to the JJTree grammar. We will also add a not equivalent… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on April 17, 2008 at 3:30am — 1 Comment

Hacking BeanShell with JavaCC - Building a Language

A few months ago

Clifton Royston posted an excellent entry titled

Recursive descent parsing with BNF grammars. This inspired me to write about

JavaCC, my favorite parser generator. Today I finally got around to putting together some examples. Academic articles on parser generators and… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 31, 2008 at 3:30am — 1 Comment

Paint Delegates in Java Swing and .NET WinForms

A few months back I blogged about an excellent Swing look and feel called

Nimbus. Nimbus is entirely vector based and does all its painting using delegates that can be layered and shared. Painters are used to draw tiled images, gradients, stripes, glass effects, etc. They also support Photoshop-like filters. Painter Example:

    MattePainter matte = new MattePainter(new Color(21, 21,…

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Added by Daniel Leuck on March 30, 2008 at 5:00pm — No Comments

A 15 Minute Intro to C# for Java Developers

Intro

This is a quick intro to C# for Java developers. Why should you care what those C# guys are doing? If you are a pragmatic developer you know its good to have a few languages in your toolbox. If you are a member of the anti-Microsoft crowd, think of it as a way to "keep your enemies closer." :-) The C# language features added to Java 5 make it clear Sun and the JCP are taking this approach.

C# is a very close relative of Java. Its inventor,… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 29, 2008 at 3:30pm — 2 Comments

Why is Google Losing in Russia and Asia?

Google handles 65% of all web searches in the US and 86% of all searches in the UK. Its advertising revenue for 2007 was twice that of its three closest competitors combined, up 44% over 2006. Google has 79% of the pay-per-click ad market and controls 40% of all online advertising. This dominance has largely translated to success in Western Europe and South America, but not Russia or Asia. Why?

Google is having a rough time in… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 26, 2008 at 2:00am — 1 Comment

Java Icon Format & API

After a month long hiatus from coding I decided to jump back in and finish a project I started a few years ago. Java has always lacked a proper icon format such as Window's

ICO and OS X's

ICNS. A modern icon format and API should support: 1. 32 bit color (ARGB) 2. Vector and bitmap images (multiple sizes for bitmaps) 3. Bundling of icon variants in… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 24, 2008 at 1:00pm — 5 Comments

Tipping Points in Social Networks

The science of social networks has always interested me, which is part of the reason I decided to launch TechHui. I often wonder what the tipping point is for this network. Have we already reached it? If I was hit by a bus tomorrow, would TechHui continue to be a viable social network a year from now? As we approach 200 members, and other active posters have started to appear, I believe the answer is yes, but this is just a gut feeling. What are the metrics? Do they differ for vertically… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 22, 2008 at 12:30pm — 15 Comments

iPhone in Japan, Thailand and Madagascar

Salama Folks! We are just back from a long trip that took us to Thailand, Madagascar, Maritius and Japan. Although it was an amazing trip and I would love to post here about all our great experiences, I don't want to get too far off topic. If you are interested in pics and stories please check out our Makinet ning site.

It was interesting to note the level of iPhone adoption in each country. I met two people with iPhones in Antananarivo,… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 21, 2008 at 8:30pm — No Comments

Bonjour Madagascar!

Aloha TechHuians,

We are leaving for Madagascar on Monday. Mika and I are very excited! Two ninjas and a gun-happy Ukrainian body builder (old family friends) will be staying at our place, so don't get any funny ideas.

We hope other community members will blog in our absence. The rules are simple:

- Entries should be about technology

- Entries should be at least a few sentences long

- We don't allow blog… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 15, 2008 at 3:00pm — No Comments

Customs Wants Your Passwords

I just read a rather disturbing article on CNN about laptop searches at airports. It describes laptop searches of US citizens that include forcing people to provide passwords for files containing private personal and corporate data. I've run across similar articles on the BBC and in the Economist. These searches require no suspicion of wrongdoing. The CBP (… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 11, 2008 at 5:03pm — 5 Comments

Aku Shaper: Swing Surfboard Design

Local company

Aku Shaper has developed a great web start Swing app that allows you to model surfboards for production on their high precision Aku Shaper machine. The app is incredibly easy to use, even if you have no experience with 3D modeling tools. The GUI presents you with a bezier curve editor that has preset points placed only in the areas that make sense for a surf board's shape. After you shape your board in the curve editor Aku Shaper… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 9, 2008 at 7:24pm — 1 Comment

Tech Picks: John McCain and Barack Obama

Technology pundits from around the blogsphere are weighing in on the primaries. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame recently endorsed John McCain and… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 3, 2008 at 5:00pm — No Comments

Sprout!

Local company

ChipIn recently launched an amazing WYSIWYG flash widget builder called

Sprout. Sprout allows you to combine shapes, images, videos, RSS feeds, maps, and more with a dead simple drag and drop interface. After creating your Sprout (widget) you can publish your creation on dozens of web platforms including MySpace, Facebook and all the popular blogging sites. You can track usage of your widgets… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 3, 2008 at 5:00pm — 2 Comments

Office on Silverlight

(cross posted from the Flex group)

Instead of wasting $44 billion on Yahoo in an effort to fight a battle lost to Google long ago, why not invest in developing office applications for Silverlight? This would allow simultaneous releases on Windows, OSX and (soon)… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 1, 2008 at 4:21pm — 3 Comments

Microsoft Offers $44.6 Billion For Yahoo

In its latest attempt to fend off archrival Google, Microsoft made an unsolicited $44.6 billion bid to acquire the most heavily trafficked site on the web. Maybe Balmer can figure out a better way to monetize Yahoo's traffic than Mr. Yang.

In addition to Yahoo's impressive traffic in the US, its important to note Yahoo is the 900 pound guerilla of the Japanese internet where it enjoys Google-like dominance in terms of search, advertising, auctions, etc. After the US, Japan is arguably… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 1, 2008 at 5:30am — No Comments