Ti Point Tork

Nine to Noon: 3 March 2011

March 2, 2011 – 1:40 pm
This post is about my 3 March 2011 appearance on Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand. Listen to the show in MP3 and OGG. My notes below were made during research for the show, but we often depart from the script. In particular, this week I ad-libbed about the Christchurch Recovery Map project. Something new this week: I solicited topics from my Twitter followers, and got some great story ideas that I wouldn't otherwise have covered. Go team! Thanks to Don Christie, Bernard Hickey, and Daniel Spector. Links Life from Apple iPad 2 event, antilasers, 3d Printing company, Reprap, MakerBot, Ponoko, ThingiVerse, NZ Tech Company Sells to US Partner. Quakes and Computers * how have Christchurch computer businesses been affected? * were people outside Christchurch affected? * what's been learned? Tech business in Christchurch have been affected by the quake. Not just employees dealing with lost houses. There's still intermittent ...

Posted in New Zealand, Radio, Technology | 2 Comments »

Nine to Noon: 17 February 2011

March 2, 2011 – 12:55 pm
This post is about my 17 February appearance on Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand. Listen to the show in MP3 and OGG. My notes below were made during research for the show, but we often depart from the script. NOTE: An alert reader wrote to RNZ after the show and pointed out that Moore's Law is only "eerily accurate" if you ignore the fact that it is restated and revised whenever facts contradict the current predictions. He pointed me to this mythbusting. Links Space shuttle computer, Moore's Law, Exponential growth, The MOST Important Problem You'll Ever See. Instapaper; Long form.org. Webstock. Moore's Law and Mobile I just bought my wife a new mobile phone, and I had to take a moment to boggle. At first it was just at the price, but then it was at what she was getting for that price. The computers we carry around in our ...

Posted in Radio, Technology | No Comments »

Nine to Noon: 3 February 2011

March 2, 2011 – 12:50 pm
I resumed my Nine to Noon radio segments on Radio New Zealand. I'll be on every other week, beginning 3 February 2011. MP3 and OGG available. Below are my notes, made as I researched the topics for the 3 February 2011 show. We often depart from the notes, so they're not a reliable substitute for what aired. Nat Torkington will cover: * is Google getting less useful? * how do we keep something forever? Links Many commentators are talking about a decline in the quality of Google's search results. It's pretty important given we all use Google. The BBC Domesday Project is a canary in the coalmine about the longevity of digital media, whose lifetime isn't long according to The US National Archives (cf the original Domesday Book). Hard drive failure rates. NZ's National Digital Heritage Archive. Search and Spam Ignorance is now a human condition. What do we do? ...

Posted in Radio, Technology | No Comments »

Career Advice

February 13, 2011 – 4:46 pm
I was honoured to give a talk of career advice to the 2010 Summer of Tech students. I appear to have let a few f-bombs fly, so don't watch if that sort of thing offends you. (In fact, you should probably stop reading my blog if that sort of thing offends you. For fuck's sake.) No transcription, as my notes consisted of a scrawled mindmap. Talk embedded below. What do you want to do when you grow up? with Nat Torkington from SummerOfTech on Vimeo.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Kiwi Foo Turns 5

February 8, 2011 – 7:24 pm
We're counting down the days here at the mothership, getting ready for the 5th Kiwi Foo Camp. It's hard to believe this is year five already, the time's flown by. I've had a few people ask for more details than are on the web site, so I thought I'd explain how it came to be and how it works. In 2005 I returned from 10 years in the US tech world. We moved to the country because I wanted a bucolic NZ life for my kids, but I also wanted to find a way to help NZ. It'd done a lot for me and I wanted to give back. One of the things I'd seen work really well in America was the way O'Reilly Media's "Foo Camp" brought together people from different fields who might not ordinarily meet to spark collaboration between them. At American Foo Camp, ...

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

Changing the Demographics of Innovation

September 16, 2010 – 2:56 pm
Text of notes for a talk given at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the New Zealand Computer Society in Rotorua, 17 September 2010. I will link to video when it's posted by the conference organizers. Hello everyone. Thank you for the kind introduction, and thank you to the New Zealand Computer Society for having me here. Let's get nostalgic for a bit. It's the 50th anniversary, we can afford to be nostalgic a little. Whose first computer was a mainframe? Whose was a mini? Whose first experience was through punched cards? Who had a microcomputer, like a BBC Micro or Spectrum? Whose first was a PC? My first computer was a Commodore 64. 64K of RAM, not enough colours, great programmable audio, built-in BASIC …. The reset switch was a paperclip across two of the terminals in the exposed cartridge port. That was where ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | 4 Comments »

From our local newspaper

September 5, 2010 – 10:26 am
Our local newspaper, Mahurangi Matters, had this great piece of short news (sadly not online yet): Local firemen recently responded to a 3.30am call "power causing concern". The homeowner could hear a humming sound seemingly coming from her bathroom wall. The firemen were all set to knock down walls to find the source when the officer in charge found a "personal item" vibrating in a stainless steel dish on the vanity. Not realising what it was, he picked it up and took it out to an ultimately "very embarrassed" lady. This is the same magazine with a page 5 story "Knitter gets knickers in a knot over rival group's name" about two knitting groups who want to call themselves "Chicks with Sticks". I love being back home.

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

Interviewed by Haegwan Kim

August 19, 2010 – 3:26 pm
Haegwan is interviewing famous and interesting people to talk about what they do and advice they might have to people wanting to be successful. He interviewed me earlier this month. I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm flattered by the company I keep: racing car drivers, famous technologists, novelists, and astrophysicists.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Joined Silverstripe Board

August 17, 2010 – 6:44 am
Last month I was honoured to join Silverstripe as a director. Silverstripe makes an open source Content Management System backed by Sapphire, an elegant PHP framework, builds websites for NZ and international customers, and has a new performance monitoring product that's rapidly gaining traction. I was on their advisory board as they hired their first external CEO, made the Deloitte Fast 50, expanded internationally, launched the developer programme, and built their product, and I love how they've approached opportunities and challenges with the same thoughtful equanimity. I'm joining a group of experienced and knowledgeable folks on the board, and look forward to learning a lot from them. Most importantly, though, Silverstripe is great people: smart, thoughtful, caring, and passionate about employees, customers, and open source. I couldn't ask to work with a smarter company and I'm delighted to join them on their fantastic trajectory.

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Nine to Noon: 8 April 2010

April 7, 2010 – 5:31 pm
You can listen to my Nine to Noon emerging technology slot from 8 April 2010 in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats. The links for the show appear below, followed by some notes I wrote beforehand to figure out what I thought and how to explain things like network neutrality. We varied from the notes and I got to tie this into the UK's grim Digital Economy Bill, our Copyright Act abuse, and the upcoming ACTA trade agreement, which left me feeling very happy. Links: Network Neutrality: Save The Internet, U.S. Court Curbs FCC Authority on Web Traffic, Wired's coverage, the End-to-End Principle. iPad: iPad, Nine Banned iPhone Apps, iPad censors SPERM, But Will It Blend? Network Neutrality Is your ISP allowed to mess with your Internet traffic? We pay them to connect to the Internet, but in America they want to do more. They want the ability to treat some traffic different ...

Posted in politics, Radio, Technology | No Comments »