I’ve received a lot of great feedback and compliments from people regarding the development of the Hawaiian language interface for Google. Mahalo to everyone who sent notes of congratulations for the accomplishment and recognition from the Governor’s office. I would like to address one element that came out in several stories, including the announcement by the Governer’s office, on this development. In these stories, it was stated that “Hawaiian has become the first native American language available through the “Google in Your Language” program”, or something similar. Hawaiian is not a native American language, and in the press release that…
Connectivity Issues, Part Deux
About two years ago I blogged about the connectivity problems we had at our home in Kurtistown, and how we came across a wireless provider that solved our issues, Advanced Wireless Systems Hawai‘i, and showed what lengths it took to get wireless to our home (see picture below). All was well for the first 18 months of use, and about 6 months ago we began to experience slower connectivity, which eventually devolved into sporadic connectivity with periods of nothing but message os “cannot reach server”. After putting up with this for a few months I finally called AWS, and after…
WordPress WierdNess
Aloha gang, my apologies for the boring theme and lack of activity. I’ve been experiencing a lot of behind-the-scenes issues with WordPress since upgrading to 2.8.4, and have been unable to resolve it. It’s starting to look like a configuration issue on my ISP’s server. He’s looking into it and hopefully it will be resolved soon so I can resume providing you with mind-numbing updates that will help solve your insomnia.
Macron Support in iPhone 3.0 Update
I laid out $9.95 for the iPhone 3.0 update for my iPod Touch last night, and just discovered why it was worth it – the standard US Keyboard now allows you to insert the vowel-kahak? characters and ‘okina. Here’s how you do it: When you want to type an ‘okina-vowel, touch and hold down your finger over the vowel for a second or two, and it will pop-up a list of available diacritic characters (see the graphic at right to see how this list looks when I held down over the letter “a” on the keyboard). Whether the vowel-macron is…
More To iPod Touch Hawaiian Support
I posted a few days ago about finding the Hawai‘i region in the iPod Touch, and apparently the system-level support is even better than I thought. I set up a few locations using the Weather application, and found that it displayed the days of the week in Hawaiian as well. Too cool. What would be cooler would be to have the Hawaiian keyboard, too. I did find that I could not post this screenshot to this blog using WordPress for iPhone application – I kept getting: “Communication Error. Operation could not be completed (NSXMLParserErrorDomain error 5.” Hmmm.
No iPhone For Keola
While it seemed half of the civilized words was standing in line in order to purchase a new iPhone yesterday, we opted for a much less expensive albeit less technologically advanced option. Kenneth uses and highly recommended MobiPCS. I investigated their plans and for less money than one iPhone all-you-can-eat voice and text plan, we now have three lines – one for my wife, my daughter and myself. We have unlimited local and national calls and unlimited texts within the US. We got the Motorola E815’s for myself and my wife (at left), and a Motorola Razr for M?lia. The…
iTunes 8008 Download Errors
A few weeks after we moved into our flat in Dunedin, I began to experience some very strange errors when downloading TV programs and movies from iTunes Music Store (iTMS). After beginning the download, I would see the “time remaining” indicator jump from a few hours remaining to just a few minutes. The number would then climb a bit, and then I’d get an 8008 error, along with an indication that the file was corrupted. After a number of attempts I noticed that the file always stopped on a multiple of 10Meg, plus .1 megabyte (70.1, 80.1, 120.1). It would…
Paddy Tax
Pat Phelan has been on the warpath since O2 announced its pricing scheme for the iPhone deployment in Ireland on March 14. Alexia and Conor find a few more Paddy Taxes that O2 hoists upon its customers. If you look deep enough it is in much of the telecom industry, though there are a few exceptions like Pat’s own ventures and (for a particular kind of user) MobiPCS back in Hawai‘i. But by and large the major players all treat customers like potential prey instead of valued customers – it’s death by a thousand razors, or Paddy Taxes. My wife…
Rent-To-Own Movies in iTMS?
Here is an idea for you guys at Apple who make decisions regarding iTMS, and I know you all read this blog. It would be great if customers were given the ability, after renting a movie, to be able to buy it and just pay the difference. After I watched “Once” I wished I had bought it, but I’m not going to spend $10 more (or whatever the purchase price is) after spending $4 to rent it. The movies expire and auto-delete 24 hours after you watch. Apple should give renters the opportunity to pay the difference within that time…
Is A Hawaiian Language Social Network Possible? It Seems So
Mahalo to Conn for pointing out the localizability of Ning. I’ve been searching for a platform on which to develop a Hawaiian language social network, and Ning just might do the trick. Ning is a social networking site co-founded by Mark Andreeson (of Netscape fame) and Gina Bianchini. It looks to have enough functionality to be attractive to our students who are using MySpace extensively, and includes enough interoperability with other services (Google Video, YouTube and Flickr) to be very useful. You can also directly upload videos (up to 100Mg each), photos (up to 10Mg each), have a blog and…