Ti Point Tork

Zuckerberg Interview: FFS!

March 12, 2008 – 2:19 pm
Now that Silicon Valley is slowly returning trickling back from Austin, I'd like to post something I wrote during The Zuckerberg Interview Soap Opera ... This is an example of the intellectuanal Ouroboros that hits Silicon Valley in waves. Let's see what's wrong with this intarwebs blow up, shall we? Who in their right mind goes to a keynote with Mark Zuckerberg and is DISAPPOINTED when it goes wrong? What the fuck did you EXPECT? I mean, come on, he runs a bloody SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE. That's like running a "web mall" in 1997! What did you think you were going to learn? The secret of getting a hundred million users? Hint: Zuckerberg would pay to go to a keynote to learn that--Facebook barely has 60M. MySpace passed 100M in 2006. It happened at SxSW, a conference with no discernable purpose other than to meet ...

Posted in Rant | 4 Comments »

Explaining technology in words

February 28, 2008 – 1:54 pm
Julie Starr faced an interesting problem recently: how to explain RSS, aggregators, even Twitter to a room full of journalism students ... without slides or a net connection. In attempting this, as she says, she "found a new respect for teachers this week". As a recovering teacher (or, as we're called when companies pay the bill and we have no pedagogic qualifications, trainer) I thought I'd give it a go. The basic rule is that you start with what they already know and move out from there. So rather than starting with Twitter, I'd start with newspaper web sites ... You know how at the heart of a newspaper's web site is a continuously-growing pile of stories, but there's a lot of web site froufrou on top of it? I'm talking about how stories are separated into pages and pumped with ads and links to other parts ...

Posted in New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »

ETech

February 26, 2008 – 10:35 pm
I'll be in San Diego for ETech, arriving in San Diego on Sunday and leaving on Thursday. If you'll be around, look me up. I'd love to catch up!

Posted in Personal | No Comments »

Font Geeks in New Zealand

February 26, 2008 – 10:34 pm
I often joke that Foo Camp ("Friends of O'Reilly") should be Font Camp (Friends of Nat Torkington) in New Zealand. I love typography and was delighted to find "The Font Scene in New Zealand", a list of typographers and fonts made by New Zealanders or by New Zealand companies. My favourite so far is Feijoa (PDF), made by Kris Sowersby who was also featured in the latest Idealog.

Posted in New Zealand, Technology | 1 Comment »

Crafty Kiwis

February 24, 2008 – 10:09 am
Congrats to Sue Tyler and the Ponoko team, and all the others who were interviewed by Peter Griffin for the Idealog issue focusing on craft. The article (which will be online in a few weeks) has photos of various Ponoko-made goods, including a necklace of sheep which looked awfully familiar—Sue had given us one for our daughter when we were in town for Webstock! I hadn't realized at the time that it came hot off the presses from the Ponoko team. Good on yez!

Posted in Business, New Zealand | No Comments »

Reboot

February 23, 2008 – 10:50 pm
I've finally got around to moving my blog to WordPress (it's what geeks do to avoid work). I'm going to see whether a web interface will help me blog more. The weather's great, but I've been really busy since Kiwi Foo to enjoy it. Occupying my time: Webstock and O'Reilly Radar blogging. I have hopes that I'll get caught up just in time to go to ETech. My friend Rael and I are hanging out for a day in Los Angeles, catching up on life, then I'll be in San Diego from Saturday night through Thursday night. If you'll be there, send me some mail and we'll catch up. Kids are good, though could benefit from more Daddy time. Jenine's been busy as, too, helping to organize the Leigh Carnival. School stuff sorted itself out: only one kid turned up to the Christian club, so ...

Posted in Meta | 1 Comment »

Microsoft sues its customers

May 15, 2007 – 10:46 pm
There's a lot of talk about this Fortune article around Microsoft, Linux, and the 235 patents that Microsoft claim Linux infringes upon. Here's my redux: Microsoft is extorting patent payments from users of open source software, beginning with the customers who also use Microsoft software. Microsoft has not identified the patents, neither to the customers nor to the makers of open source software. Without a list of the patents and where Microsoft thinks they're being infringed, the claims can't be verified and so remain unproven baseless allegations. Imagine if IBM came to Microsoft customers and said "we believe Windows infringes 235 of our patents, you should pay us so we don't sue you. We won't tell you what the patents are, we won't tell Microsoft either. But pay up or there could be trouble in your future." With this action, Microsoft joins ...

Posted in Business | No Comments »

The Eyes Have It

January 11, 2007 – 10:45 pm
About two weeks ago, my uncle Zom got a little carried away with some repairs in the cabin and drove the family fishing boat ("Foam") onto some rocks. Getting it off damaged the propeller and keel, so ten days ago he and I took advantage of the time, tide, and weather to put it up on the sticks and effect some repairs. For the next two days (during low-tide only, when the boat was out of the water) he bogged the keel with fibreglass while I painted. It was fun! I painted the bum of the boat all by myself, scraping off barnacles and working on the thick viscous antifouling paint. I did one side each day, the first with roller (rollers make it much easier) and the second without (because we only had one roller and it was well trashed by this stage). ...

Posted in New Zealand, Personal | No Comments »

All Good

January 11, 2007 – 10:45 pm
I haven't blogged in a while. That doesn't mean things are bad. In fact, it's the complete opposite. Something happened around September, the end of my last trip away for 2006--something good. We just clicked. We went from feeling like strangers in a strange land to feeling like we were home. It's weird, I can't point to anything in particular. It's just that suddenly it became easier. We had friends, we weren't unhappy, we were actually enjoying ourselves. At that point we lost the drive we'd had to connect back with the people we'd left behind: Jenine stopped mailing her friends amusing stories, and I stopped blogging. So I'm afraid this blog is going to become mostly boring work and travel stuff from here on. I'll still sneak some of the kids and school in, I'm sure, but the drama ...

Posted in New Zealand, Personal | No Comments »

From US to NZ

August 30, 2006 – 10:44 pm
I just got back from a week in the US for Foo Camp, where I had a great time shopping two ideas around: New Zealand can be a hub of innovation, and Kids aren't being turned onto science and technology as careers Re: the first idea, this interesting CNet news article talks about how the 1980s and 1990s saw Indian and Chinese technologists imported into Silicon Valley to fuel the great tech booms then. Now those technologists are returning home to create startups and build the local version of Silicon Valley. Ben Nolan and John Clegg from ProjectX are examples of this in New Zealand. The head of the Berkeley School of Information Management Systems, whose thesis is this migration, hit a few resonant points for me: They go back to their own counterparts, people they might have gone to ...

Posted in Business, New Zealand, Technology | No Comments »