Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

Daniel Leuck's Blog (146)

Ning and The Future of TechHui

We've received dozens of inquiries today about the recent announcement from Ning that they are cutting their free service, and if this means the end of TechHui. It does not. TechHui is a premium network paid for by the generous sponsors you see on the right of the page. Premium networks are unaffected by the changes at Ning.

Ning has been paying for the infrastructure to host… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on April 15, 2010 at 1:00pm — 24 Comments

You Can't Have Innovation Without Education

We now have the great distinction of the shortest school year in the nation - 163 days. The national average is 180. Japan averages 243 and China averages 251. These countries also have longer school days allowing them to cover more subjects in greater depth. The sad fact of the matter is that our children will be ill prepared to compete in an increasingly…

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Added by Daniel Leuck on April 11, 2010 at 2:30pm — 18 Comments

Ikayzo & Oceanit Release Revolutionary iPhone App for Estimating the Cost of iPhone Apps

As part of a new joint venture called Ikayzo-it, Ikayzo and Oceanit have released an iPhone App dubbed iMuch? that provides iPhone development estimates based on three basic questions:

Category
One sentence description
Desired release date

For example, the entries "Game", "A game where dragons fight ninjas", and "April 7, 2010" produces an estimate of $16,421.18. "The App is… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 31, 2010 at 8:30pm — 6 Comments

Reputation Systems and Civil Online Discourse

One of the most interesting discussions at today's NewsMorphosis event centered around the difficultly of keeping online discussions productive or, at the very least, civil. Sarah Lacy described her frustration with the abusive comments that often show up on tech blogs such as TechCrunch and, given the volume of responses, the difficultly in managing them. John Temple and David Shapiro expressed… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on March 18, 2010 at 5:00pm — 18 Comments

Global Data Inflation and Sexy Statisticians

During an insanely bumpy plane flight today I read an excellent article in the Economist on data inflation and its implications. Apparently, the amount of data generated globally is, "...growing at a terrific rate (a compound annual 60%.)" IDC completed a study last year that estimated the world generated 1.2 zettabytes of data in 2008. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.

Some interesting data…

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Added by Daniel Leuck on March 5, 2010 at 7:30pm — 18 Comments

The Complexity of Regulating Web Access for Kids

Recently I've been involved in numerous discussions about how to protect young kids from inappropriate material on the web. The first was prompted by a friend concerned about what appeared to be violent adult material sent to her young son by a friend. Not being an expert in the area I turned to Wendi Kamiya, Punahou's CTO, for…

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Added by Daniel Leuck on February 27, 2010 at 7:00pm — 8 Comments

Why Hawaii is an Ideal Choice for Google's Gigabit Network

Hawaii, home to nearly 1.3 million people, is the most isolated island chain on earth. Our state's unique geographic isolation presents special challenges in keeping our families, communities and businesses connected across our islands and to the outside world. The speed and quality of our connection to the net directly impacts our ability to communicate, educate, learn and conduct business. Despite the… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 15, 2010 at 8:30am — 44 Comments

Hawaii Needs a Cabinet Level CTO & Google Apps

In late 2008 Google posted the results of a comprehensive study by the Radicati Group regarding the reliability of Exchange, Lotus Notes, GroupWise and Gmail. They found that while Gmail averaged less than 15 minutes of downtime per month (almost all of which came from one outage in August of… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on February 11, 2010 at 3:00pm — 40 Comments

Project Management and Documentation Tools

The tools we use for managing software and design projects have evolved over the years. Last year

Scott added

Basecamp to our toolset. We've found its email based workflow easy to use, especially for customers. For small projects Basecamp is often all we need,… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on January 31, 2010 at 7:00am — 5 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Scientist: UH Aquaculture Guru Dr. Tetsuzan Benny Ron

We had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Ron at the last

HVCA monthly luncheon. Benny gave an

engaging presentation on the past,… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 3, 2009 at 4:30pm — 3 Comments

Facebook Exodus Non-Story in the NYT

I normally don't comment on this sort of thing, but I received numerous links to Virginia Heffernan's vacuous NYT article titled Facebook Exodus. It must have been a very slow news day. By Virginia's own admission at the top of paragraph two, Facebook is growing at a furious rate. ComScore puts last month's unique visitors at 87.7 million and monthly growth at over 20%. To what exodus is she… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on September 1, 2009 at 3:00pm — 6 Comments