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Cybernetics Quotes

October 12, 2008 – 4:00 am
Reading A Curriculum for Cybernetics and Systems Theory, I found some thought-provoking and sometimes inspirational quotes. I've collected them below: "When we try to pick up anything by itself we find it is attached to everything in the universe." — John Muir "I throw a spear into the dark -- that is intuition. Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle to find the way of the spear -- that is logic." — Ingmar Bergman "Lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into many things indeed." — Heraclitus, 5th Century B. C. "You have about 10 minutes to act on an idea before it recedes back into dreamland." — Buckminster Fuller paraphrased by Stewart Brand "Tool: Something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end." — Stewart Brand "If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it." — Gregory ...

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More on the bizdev shortage in NZ

October 11, 2008 – 5:28 pm
James McGlinn emailed me a great reply to my piece on the business cofounder shortage in NZ, and he's finally posted it. You should read it because I agree with everything he says.

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NZ Broadband Pricing and Network Neutrality

September 28, 2008 – 9:45 pm
In this Ziff-Davis Australia article, the leaders of Australia's three largest ISPs declare network neutrality to be an American problem and explain why. It's an interesting argument, but I think there are some key elements unstated in the article. In America, largely for historical reasons, residential customers have "all you can eat" plans. Buffet bandwidth is the order of the day, every day. As the number of people online continues to grow, and they do more bandwidth-intensive things (YouTube movies vs all-text web pages), telcos must buy new hardware. "How do they pay for it?" the article asks, and offers up three solutions: charge heavy consumers more (the Australian and New Zealand "metered Internet" solution); charge the people serving lots of data rather than we who consume it (which pisses Google off and starts a "network neutrality" war); or just suck up the costs themselves. One element missing from ...

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NZ Open Source Awards

September 28, 2008 – 8:37 am
(reposted from The O'Reilly Radar blog) Wednesday night in Wellington is a lot more exciting when the New Zealand Open Source Award ceremony is on! The Minister for Communications and Information Technology, David Cunliffe, made a brief speech lauding open source and was around to hand awards to the winners. We gave out prizes for best project, contributor, use in government, use in business, use in education, use in community organization, and use for infrastructure, as well as two special awards. I was a judge (along with Don Christie, Rochelle Hume, Colin Jackson, Janet Mazenier, Chris Daish, and Paul Matthews) and presented the Project award to Silverstripe and one of the special awards. It was quite the honour to be on stage with the wonderful winners. A list of the finalists and winners is on the NZOSA web site. As all awards should be, they were very ...

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Memo to Future Nat on Slides

September 27, 2008 – 11:00 pm
Reading back through my notebook at my jottings from last week's frantic flurry of meetings, I found this hard-learned lesson: When preparing slides for others, they MUST read them when you're done and MUST give a trial presentation with the hardware in place and MUST be the presenter doing these things. Yes, I made slides for someone, and then discovered that the remote control started the slideshow just fine but didn't advance; that I'd put the sections in a different order; that the person I'd made slides for wasn't comfortable with the forward and backward keys; ... and on it went. Also valuable advice: put a blank slide at the end so it doesn't revert back to the application immediately.

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Software Freedom Day Notes: ACTA

September 19, 2008 – 3:09 pm
Mark Harris lead this session. Was at SSC, MORST, now Independent. When Wikileaks in May released ACTA doc, saw NZ mentioned, began digging. ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Proposed by Japan and USA, but not limited to them at all. About eight countries, mainly G8 and a few others like us and Morocco. Mainly about IP. Calling it "counterfeit" gets it under the radar. Also very much about the Internet. While it did talk about physical products, morphed over last four years and now about more. Don't really know what it is about: unnerving level of secrecy. Can't find anything official about what it is, other than US trade representatives office official line "it's about enforcement", a universal framework of enforcement procedures around the world. All have signed non-disclosure agreements. Silence leads to supposition. People are supposing the worst. Are they trying to ...

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Business values

September 14, 2008 – 11:09 pm
I had dinner tonight with my friend Cath Lewis, the awesome real estate agent. She told me that her new company felt right because honesty and empathy were at the top of their values. I think most of us aspire to those, but it was lovely to see them stated so clearly and given such prominence. Think what a pleasure life would be if everyone valued them so.

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Software Freedom Day

September 14, 2008 – 11:20 am
I'll be in Wellington on Saturday, September 20th, for Software Freedom Day. It's open source's open day, a chance for the general public who might have been curious about open source to come along and learn more. There'll be copies of Linux given out and a WellyLUG installfest to provide any help people need installing Linux on their own machines, a SuperHappyDevHouse hack day, and a Bar Camp (which I'm emceeing). It's going to be a heap of fun, and a chance to make a positive difference to software in this country. If you'll be in Wellington on Saturday, swing by for the 12pm kickoff and join the fun!

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Webstock 2009 Lineup Announced

September 10, 2008 – 11:59 am
I'm speaking at Webstock 2009 and really looking forward to it. What an amazing lineup of talent they have! I've been privileged to meet many of these folks before, and I'm honoured and intimidated to be in their ranks. I can safely say that New Zealand has never had such an incredible collection of technology people in one place before. Off the top of my head, here are three brilliant people on their list: Jane McGonigal: she creates Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), games that add a fictional layer to the real world. The Wellington team won records in her most recent game, The Lost Ring, that was run in the lead-up to the Olympics. How many people can say that they were flown to Beijing so people could play HER game during the Olympics? Jane can. She's currently working on games about the future ...

Posted in New Zealand, Technology | 1 Comment »

The Tyranny of Distance

September 4, 2008 – 11:51 am
Jenny Morel is raising a $100M NZ VC fund. That's good news, in that NZ needs smart angels and VCs. I've had a number of NZ friends making the rounds of US venture capital firms and angels looking for investors, and the message has always been "not while you're in NZ". Of course, it's rarely stated quite so bluntly (VCs never want to close the door!), but it's always quite clear that it's much harder to invest in something that's on the other side of the world than something you can drop in on regularly. That's a hard message for we net heads to hear. We're used to saying that the Internet can help us overcome the tyranny of distance, the fact that we're four million people on a small island in a big ocean far far away from the rest of the world. We're learning ...

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