Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Good one, National Library!

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

My friend Aaron Swartz writes about the increasingly-evil OCLC: Not satisfied with controlling the world's largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It's now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally ...

NZ Broadband Pricing and Network Neutrality

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

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 ...

Memo to Future Nat on Slides

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

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, ...

Software Freedom Day Notes: ACTA

Friday, September 19th, 2008

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 ...

Software Freedom Day

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

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 ...

Webstock 2009 Lineup Announced

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

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 ...

The Tyranny of Distance

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

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 ...

NZ Values

Monday, June 9th, 2008

I had a thought on Saturday that wouldn't let go. Here's the brief pitch: let me know what you think.

Will, Systems, Distractions, and Irony

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Paul Graham, the creator of Y! Combinator, recently wrote an essay in which he said "Maybe in the long term the right answer for dealing with Internet distractions will be software that watches and controls them". The link on "software" was to Rescue Time, a web site that gathers ...

Teaching Kids Computer Skills and Programming

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Last year, Kiwi Foo Camp acted as a fundraiser for my kids' local primary school. Around 60 kids, 3.5 teachers, and at the time they had around six old Windows 2000 and Windows XP boxes in various stages of decay. They'd planned to buy new computers but were ...