Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Daniel Leuck's Blog – February 2008 Archive (7)

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