Kevin Scannell have corresponded for many years in regards to issues that face indigenous and endangered languages and the use of technology in their revitalization. I was honored that he asked me to do this interview and talk about the work that I’ve done at Ka Haka ‘Ula O Ke‘elikōlani over the years in regards to Hawaiian language and its use in technology. His website, Indigenous Tweets, keeps track of the use of various indigenous languages around the world.
MS Word Tweaks For Hawaiian
Have you ever had this happen to you when typing in Hawaiian: Nānā I ke kumu or Hawai‘I? By default, MS Word capitalizes any instances of a stand-alone “i”. You can fix this; read this to find out how.
Hacked! Argh!!!
Last week I got a call from my ISP that my WordPress install had been hacked. I feel so exposed. Unfortunately I didn’t live up to my mantra of “backup, backup, and backup again” when it came to the blog, and my ISP’s oldest backup was done after the hack and been done. I’ve restored the blog back to last summer, but everything else is lost. I may have some of the old articles saved as text files on my hard drive and will post them as I find them. Thanks to Mark at Pacific Pro-Tech Services for all the…
Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh
My wife has been having issues with her older Mac laptop, and and examination determined that it was indeed on its last legs. Not being able to afford to buy her a new Mac laptop right now, I looked around for options. Getting her a Windows or Linux box was not at option, so began to explore the possibility of building her a Hackintosh – a netbook that would normally run Windows or Linux, but was capable of running OS X as well. Boing Boing has a chart comparing various netbooks and what functions worked and did not work when…
Google, Hawaiian and “Native American” Languages
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.
Getting Online Locally
This past Saturday I met for the first time in person with a group that calls itself the Big Island Internet Society. I came across a few of the folks on Twitter, and you can follow some of the planning and conversations using Twitter hash tags #bialoha. Many of their blogs can be found linked at Damon Tucker”s excellent FBI (From Big Island) blogs website. I found this interesting as I first got involved with Twitter after learning about it from some of my Ireland friends. I later found some O‘ahu-based friends using it, and only recently came across this…
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.
12 Wasted Hours
view original Originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk Today was a state holiday in Hawai‘i, but I was in the office trying to upgrade Leok?, our FirstClass server, along with our other techie. Everything seemed to go fine, took four hours or so to back up the post office (where all user and conference data is stored) and migrate it to a new Mac Pro. There we discovered that the administrator account was borked. After a few hours on the phone with a consultant we use on the mainland, we decided to go back to our backup of the system and…