Nat Torkington

I’m excited, I’m going to be at the 2009 GOVIS conference on Government and IT.

This talk looks to be interesting: Since intellectual property law’s beginning competing interests have stretched the law.

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 Johnson, and the dude who did the Obama poster.

My OSCON talk on teaching kids to program is now available as an audio podcast on the ITC Conversations Network.

I’m going to be appearing regularly on Nine to Noon on National Radio Radio New Zealand National.

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 promoting economic activity, it is easy to see why having broadband

The Telecommunications Carriers Forum have released a note to ISPs saying that while they’re working on a policy that will comply with S92A of the Copyright Act (“An Internet Service Provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for…

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 Torkington, an author, musician, and software professional whose

At the New Zealand Open Source Awards, David Cunliffe (the then Minister of Health as well as of IT) literally tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether I’d be interested in serving on HISAC, the Health Information Strategy Advisory Committee.

Way to go, National Library of New Zealand!

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.

Today I was on the National Radio show Nine To Noon.

Auckland Even when I’m well stoned on a tab of LSD or Indian grass, you still look to me like an elephant’s arsehole surrounded by blue-black haemorrhoids, The sound of the opening and shutting of bankbooks, The thudding of refrigerator doors, The ripsaw…

November 7th is World Plone Day, when the Plone community will run outreach events around the world to “promote and educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using Plone in education, government, NGOs, and in business”.

In case you’re interested but don’t follow O’Reilly Radar, I’ve recently made a few posts there about the mortgage dramas: Effect of the Depresson on Technology The Connected Economy Torkington’s Law

James McGlinn emailed me a great reply to my piece on the business cofounder shortage in NZ, and he’s finally posted it.

Reading A Curriculum for Cybernetics and Systems Theory, I found some thought-provoking and sometimes inspirational quotes.

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.

(reposted from The O’Reilly Radar blog) Wednesday night in Wellington is a lot more exciting when the New Zealand Open Source Award ceremony is on!

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 p…

Mark Harris lead this session.

I had dinner tonight with my friend Cath Lewis, the awesome real estate agent.

I’ll be in Wellington on Saturday, September 20th, for Software Freedom Day.

I’m speaking at Webstock 2009 and really looking forward to it.

I found this list on the web and loved it.

Jenny Morel is raising a $100M NZ VC fund.

Kiwi Foo Camp was my way of finding and support great technical talent in NZ.

I had a thought on Saturday that wouldn’t let go.

I’m impressed by Budget Hero, a game from the American Marketplace radio show.

Paul Graham, the creator of Y!

Last year, Kiwi Foo Camp acted as a fundraiser for my kids’ local primary school.

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.

I see in Rod Drury’s blog that National have released their first real economic policy and it’s to do with funding fibre-to-the-home in NZ.

A client made the decision to use Telecom as their web site host.

Read this ABC news story on digital frames coming with viruses installed if you want a glimpse at an unpleasant future.

I took a trip to ETech earlier this month.

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.

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.

I often joke that Foo Camp (“Friends of O’Reilly”) should be Font Camp (Friends of Nat Torkington) in New Zealand.

I’ll be in San Diego for ETech, arriving in San Diego on Sunday and leaving on Thursday.

I’ve finally got around to moving my blog to WordPress (it’s what geeks do to avoid work).

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.

There’s a lot of talk about this Fortune article around Microsoft, Linux, and the 235 patents that Microsoft claim Linux infringes upon.

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.

I haven’t blogged in a while.

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 n…

Before I left for my last trip to the US, I went to a school board meeting where a program called Super Kids was discussed.

Great news!

Great news!

Back in New Zealand after nearly three months away.