Ti Point Tork

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.

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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.

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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 »

Nine to Noon: 4 Mar 2010

March 3, 2010 – 8:51 pm
I talked today about cryptography, China, and Facebook's billions. My apologies for how rushed it was on air, but we had less time than usual. I've written up below what I was going to say. Listen in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Links The Code Book, Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese, and Facebook on Track for $1B Revenue This Year. Cryptography I've read this fabulous book on cryptography by Simon Singh, "The Code Book". It's easy to read and full of the little anecdotes and trivia nuggets that I love. The book opens with the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. It's a great story for illustrating the value and dangers of cryptography. Mary, as I'm sure you know, was sister to Queen Elizabeth and probably had the better claim to the throne. She misjudged the politics and showed up in England to get away from tetchy Scottish ...

Posted in Radio, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

NZ Doing Good in ACTA Negotiation

March 1, 2010 – 1:15 pm
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an agreement between countries around IP rights and enforcement. The negotiations have been happening in secret, with every country saying "well, we'd love to reveal what we're talking about but those other countries just won't let us". Fortunately there have been leaks, and the latest is a fascinating glimpse at how these things are put together and where the parties stand. It seems bizarre at first, but the draft is laid out like a spreadsheet: one article per row and with three columns, one each for the US/Japan version, the EU version, and comments. Inside each sentence square brackets mark the attributed proposed alternatives for language. From this we can tell some very interesting things about the New Zealand position: NZ negotiators are keen on the wording "copyright and related rights and trademarks" rather than the US's catch-all "intellectual property". Richard ...

Posted in New Zealand, politics, Technology | 6 Comments »

Nine to Noon, 18 Feb 2010

February 22, 2010 – 12:45 pm
You can listen to my Nine to Noon emerging technology slot from 18 Feb 2010 in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats. The links for the show appear below, though we didn't get to the media scares story: Computer Engineer Barbie, Digital Books and Your Rights, and A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook. The author of the latter writes the excellent Mind Hacks blog.

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Community Management Workshop

February 21, 2010 – 10:36 am
I attended a workshop on community management at Webstock, and at the end asked the attendees to write down some words of wisdom for a new community manager, maybe something they wish they'd been told or something they learned at the workshop. Here's their collected advice: Networking is important—often there are other groups doing similar things that are happy to piggy-back on projects or contribute resource. Before you start, understand your resource requirement and allow for growth, especially if updating/collecting info for the community. It's easy to contact and update for 60 organisations, a lot harder for 3,000. Depth of relationship allows for more engagement and vulnerability. Keep raising the bar! "Personal" rewards from community involvement translates to professional reward and back again. Always have a back-up person—don't be your own single point of failure. It can be important to reward people for participating in your online community. Go where your community already is, ...

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