Simon Willison's Weblog ∞
The inspiration for this site’s redesign. Simon builds his blog with a custom Django app and publishes a mix of entries, links, and notes.
technology
Proposed Changes to NZ's R&D Incentives
There’s an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ’s R&D incentives. In particular, they’ll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace …
"Outcome is a function of process"
I was just catching up on Tim Kong’s excellent blog, when I read this great quote from Dan Carter: “One thing we talk about over and over with this current All Blacks side is about never …
Startups and failure
(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration. On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it. Instead of …
Lesson: Moats and Flywheels
It’s bloody hard to build something new into the world. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy: there’s a lot of unfunded and unrecognised work that you have to do before you can …
The Best You Can Be
I write a short daily series for O’Reilly Media, Four Short Links, which I’ve done for years. I recently posted a link to someone’s “10 Golden Rules for Becoming a Better …
Kiwi Startups in Silicon Valley
I was asked for comment by Bill Bennet from the NZ Herald, for a piece on Kiwi startups moving to Silicon Valley. He built a nice little article, in which “Torkington says” features …
Some Things Don't Change
In this internal 1972 DEC memo (PDF) about the PDP-16 re-release, modern tech companies should find plenty of familiar territory: While the PDP-16 has been marginally successful to date, some problems …
"Work" continued
I moderated a panel today at Gather on the topic of “Work”. We had representatives from different types of work: self-employed, salaried employee, startup, and investor. As moderator, my …
Dear Boosted: Surprise Me and Succeed
The NZ Arts Foundation has launched Boosted, a way to crowdfund arts projects. Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering “don’t we already have several ways of doing …
Easily Creating Twitter Lists From Lists of Twitter Users
Kiwi Foo Camp just ended. This year, I collected Twitter handles as part of registration and I wanted to create a Twitter list. Twitter doesn’t provide an easy way to do this: you’re …
Copywrongs and Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield is New Zealand’s literary icon: feminist, bisexual, incredibly gifted, part of the Bloomsbury circle of clever people pushing literary form before she died of tuberculosis. …
Delayed Broadcast of International Programs
It’s always seemed strange to me that local broadcasters would hold off broadcasting Dr Who, Mad Men, and other high-profile shows. Viewers chatter about it as soon as an episode airs in its …
Judge Harvey, Kim Dotcom, and The Press
Judge David Harvey has stepped down from the Kim DotCom case. At NetHui last week, he led a discussion of copyright where opinions from the floor were variously thoughtful, passionate, and novel. He …
Education and Technology
I’ve been in the position of being a geek talking with teachers for a while, and I’ve found it best to approach the whole area of education with humility. In education, as in business, you …
Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong
It was my pleasure to address the National and State Librarians of Australasia on the eve of their strategic planning meeting in Auckland at the start of November this year. I have been involved in …
Nine to Noon: 3 March 2011
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 …
Nine to Noon: 17 February 2011
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 …
Nine to Noon: 3 February 2011
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 …
Changing the Demographics of Innovation
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 …
Interviewed by Haegwan Kim
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 …
Joined Silverstripe Board
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 …
Nine to Noon: 8 April 2010
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 …
NZ Doing Good in ACTA Negotiation
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 …
Community Management Workshop
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 …
Media 7: Social Media
I had a good time a few weeks ago with Russell Brown, Vaughn Davis, and Ms Behaviour talking about social media on the Media 7 show. You can watch it online.
NZICT Near Future Digital Priorities Paper
NZICT is an industry lobby group, representing the NZ ICT industry (software, hardware, services, networks, education, and training). They’ve just released a “Near Future Digital …
Telecom Encouraging Uploads
Citing growth in photo-sharing and social media sites, Telecom have announced they won’t charge for upstream traffic. That is to say, upload photos and movies all you like until the end of …
Libraries, Health, and Internet
Not the solution to the world’s problems, just my agenda this week. Mon-Wed was in Christchurch for the LIANZA conference. Wednesday night, a HISAC dinner. Thursday is a HISAC meeting, the last …
Nine to Noon: 12 August 2009
I went through two telephones in this Colorado house and neither of them could hold onto the call. Now that’s frustrating! Here’s what I was going to speak about: I will talk about recent …
Nine to Noon: 16 July 2009
Listen to my 16 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about Science Foo Camp which was at the Google campus last weekend: discovering new science from huge amounts of …
Nine to Noon: 2 July 2009
Listen to my 2 July 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about emotional robots, Kiwi web awards, and a new US government transparency web site. Below are my notes. I …
Nine to Noon: 18 June 2009
Listen to my 18 June 2009 appearance on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show. I spoke about online dating scams, Twitter’s role in the Iranian election protests, and would have spoken …
Open New Zealand
Glen Barnes and I have softlaunched opengovt.org.nz, an effort to do some MySociety-style projects for New Zealand. Glen’s built a catalog for open government data, and there’s a mailing …
Nat at Govis, May 2009
I’m excited, I’m going to be at the 2009 GOVIS conference on Government and IT. I’m closing the event out on Friday May 22, but also running two workshops before it opens: Work With …
Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
The New York Public Library and Wired Magazine have collaborated to bring a set of evening lectures on how new technology is changing the economics of art with speakers Lawrence Lessig, Stephen …
Radio NZ National: Transparency
I’m going to be appearing regularly on Nine to Noon on National Radio Radio New Zealand National. I’m every other week, alternating with Colin Jackson. After the show airs, I’ll post …
Teaching Kids to Program
My OSCON talk on teaching kids to program is now available as an audio podcast on the ITC Conversations Network.
NZ Broadband
There hasn’t been a lot of action from the new Government on broadband (or anything, really, yet) but this Economist article is food for thought about spending priorities: When it comes to …
Submission on NZ IP law and a free trade agreement with USA
SUBMISSION ON THE TRANSPACIFIC STRATEGIC ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES To: Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade Introduction This Submission is from Nathan …
National Library joins Flickr Commons
Way to go, National Library of New Zealand! They’re the latest addition to Flickr Commons!
Good one, National Library!
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. …
NZ Broadband Pricing and Network Neutrality
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 …
Memo to Future Nat on Slides
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 …
Software Freedom Day Notes: ACTA
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 …
Software Freedom Day
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 …
Webstock 2009 Lineup Announced
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 …
The Tyranny of Distance
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 …
NZ Values
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
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 …
Teaching Kids Computer Skills and Programming
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 …
How Cuckoos Do It
I was editor for the first edition of Programming PHP and, like all O’Reilly books, there was a vigorous discussion with the authors about which animal should be on the cover. All the …
Ubicomp and ubisec
Read this ABC news story on digital frames coming with viruses installed if you want a glimpse at an unpleasant future. Ubicomp ("ubiquitous computing", aka spimes aka real world objects …
Explaining technology in words
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, …
Font Geeks in New Zealand
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 …
From US to NZ
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 …
NZ Internet Use
There were 1.24 million active internet subscribers in New Zealand between March and September 2005 (NZ pop = 4M, remember) 70%, or 869,300, were modem users Total residential internet penetration was …
Looking Ahead to 2006
[I wrote up these thoughts for the NZ-2.0 list, but thought you might be interested] I’ve been thinking lately about Things To Do In 2006, and trying to figure out where technology will go in …
Day 9: First Computer Conference
I think I’m probably doing it a favour calling it a conference: Convergence Oceania was a Wireless Forum sell shop, an expo hall with a room featuring the biggest exhibitors. Everyone’s …
Google Maps-style Map of New Zealand
I can see my house from here.
Google Maps-style Map of New Zealand
I can see my house from here.
Options for NZ Mobile Diversity
New Zealand Herald article on the Irish mobile phone ecosystem, framed as “perhaps New Zealand could do this”. I’d be interested to know NZ’s mobile phone ownership as …
Public Address, Hard News, and Russell Brown
Public Address is a “community of New Zealand-centric weblogs” from interesting people, such as Hard News by Russell Brown.
Kiwi VoIP Termination
CallPlus, WorldxChange, FX Networks (perhaps). (via Sai)