Nat Torkington

Nat has chaired the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and other O'Reilly conferences for over a decade. He ran the first web server in New Zealand, co-wrote the best-selling Perl Cookbook, and was one of the founding Radar bloggers. He lives in New Zealand and consults in the Asia-Pacific region.

Perl Cookbook Perl Cookbook
by Tom Christiansen , Nat Torkington
Second Edition August 2003
Print: $49.95
Ebook: $39.99

Perl Cookbook Perl Cookbook
by Tom Christiansen , Nat Torkington
August 1998
OUT OF PRINT

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Four short links: 23 May 2013

May 23 2013

Kindle Worlds Fine Print — Amazon’s fanfic publishing system has a few flaws: no pr0n, no slash (crossovers), and Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright. I can’t … read more

Four short links: 22 May 2013

May 22 2013

XBox One Kinect Controller (Guardian) — the new Kinect controller can detect gaze, heartbeat, and the buttons on your shirt. Surveillance and the Internet of Things (Bruce Schneier) — Lots has been written about the “Internet of Things” and how … read more

Four short links: 21 May 2013

May 21 2013

Hyperinflation in Diablo 3 — interesting discussion about how video games regulate currency availability, and how Diablo 3 appears to have messed up. several weeks after the game’s debut a source claimed that there were at least 1,000 bots active … read more

Four short links: 20 May 2013

May 20 2013

Our Fair Deal — international coalition (EFF, InternetNZ, Demand Progress, Creative Freedom Foundation, many others) raising awareness and petitioning lawmakers to reject copyright proposals that restrict the open Internet, access to knowledge, economic opportunity and our fundamental rights. (via Susan … read more

Four short links: 16 May 2013

May 16 2013

Australian Filter Scope Creep — The Federal Government has confirmed its financial regulator has started requiring Australian Internet service providers to block websites suspected of providing fraudulent financial opportunities, in a move which appears to also open the door for … read more

Four short links: 15 May 2013

May 15 2013

Facial Recognition in Google Glass (Mashable) — this makes Glass umpty more attractive to me. It was created in a hackathon for doctors to use with patients, but I need it wired into my eyeballs. How to Price Your Hardware … read more

Four short links: 14 May 2013

May 14 2013

Behind the Banner — visualization of what happens in the 150ms when the cabal of data vultures decide which ad to show you. They pass around your data as enthusiastically as a pipe at a Grateful Dead concert, and you’ve … read more

Four short links: 13 May 2013

May 13 2013

Exploiting a Bug in Google Glass — unbelievably detailed and yet easy-to-follow explanation of how the bug works, how the author found it, and how you can exploit it too. The second guide was slightly more technical, so when he … read more

Four short links: 10 May 2013

May 10 2013

The Remixing Dilemma — summary of research on remixed projects, finding that (1) Projects with moderate amounts of code are remixed more often than either very simple or very complex projects. (2) Projects by more prominent creators are more generative. … read more

Four short links: 9 May 2013

May 09 2013

On Google’s Ingress Game (ReadWrite Web) — By rolling out Ingress to developers at I/O, Google hopes to show how mobile, location, multi-player and augmented reality functions can be integrated into developer application offerings. In that way, Ingress becomes a … read more

Four short links: 8 May 2013

May 08 2013

How to Build a Working Digital Computer Out of Paperclips (Evil Mad Scientist) — from a 1967 popular science book showing how to build everything from parts that you might find at a hardware store: items like paper clips, little … read more

Four Short Links: 7 May 2013

May 07 2013

Raspberry Pi Wireless Attack Toolkit — A collection of pre-configured or automatically-configured tools that automate and ease the process of creating robust Man-in-the-middle attacks. The toolkit allows your to easily select between several attack modes and is specifically designed to … read more

Four short links: 6 May 2013

May 06 2013

Nautilus — elegantly-designed science web ‘zine. Includes Artificial Emotions on AI, neuro, and psych efforts to recognise and simulate emotions. A Short Essay on 3D Printing — This hands-off approach to culpability cannot last long. If you design something to … read more

Four short links: 3 May 2013

May 03 2013

Causal Entropic Forces (PDF) — new paper from Sci Foo alum Alex Wissner-Gross connecting intelligence and entropy. (via Inside Science) Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat Are Trademarked Memes (Ars Technica) — the business of this (presumably there will be royalties … read more

Four short links: 2 May 2013

April 24 2013

Metrico — puzzle game for Playstation centered around infographics (charts and graphs). (via Flowing Data) The Lease They Can Do (Business Week) — excellent Paul Ford piece on money, law, and music streaming services. So this is not about technology. … read more

Four short links: 1 May 2013

April 24 2013

Pin: A Dynamic Binary Instrumentation Tool — a dynamic binary instrumentation framework for the IA-32 and x86-64 instruction-set architectures that enables the creation of dynamic program analysis tools. Some tools built with Pin are Intel Parallel Inspector, Intel Parallel Amplifier … read more

Four short links: 30 April 2013

April 24 2013

China = 41% of World’s Internet Attack Traffic (Bloomberg) — numbers are from Akamai’s research. Verizon Communications said in a separate report that China accounted for 96 percent of all global espionage cases it investigated. One interpretation is that China … read more

Four short links: 29 April 2013

April 24 2013

Information Security Breaches 2013 Report (UK Gov) — over 80% of small UK firms reported a breach, and over 90% of large. (via The Register) Google Glass Forbids Resales (Wired) — leaving aside the braying naysayers with their “GLASS WILL … read more

Four short links: 26 April 2013

April 24 2013

The Engagement Cliff — Gallup surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012 and found that by the time students get to high school only about 4 in … read more

Four short links: 25 April 2013

April 24 2013

Alcatraz — package manager for iOS. (via Hacker News) Scarfolk Council — clever satire, the concept being a UK town stuck in 1979. Tupperware urns, “put old people down at birth”. The 1979 look is gorgeous. (via BoingBoing) Stop Designing … read more

Four short links: 24 April 2013

April 24 2013

Solar Energy: This is What a Disruptive Technology Looks Like (Brian McConnell) — In 1977, solar cells cost upwards of $70 per Watt of capacity. In 2013, that cost has dropped to $0.74 per Watt, a 100:1 improvement (source: The … read more

Four short links: 23 April 2013

April 23 2013

Drawscript — Processing for Illustrator. (via BERG London) Archive Team Warrior — a virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the ArchiveTeam archiving efforts. It will download sites and upload them to our archive. (via Ed Vielmetti) … read more

Four short links: 22 April 2013

April 22 2013

Meshlab — open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes. HTML5 Video on iOS (Steve Souders) — While it’s true that Mobile Safari on iOS doesn’t buffer any video data as a … read more

Four short links: 19 April 2013

April 19 2013

Bruce Sterling on Disruption — If more computation, and more networking, was going to make the world prosperous, we’d be living in a prosperous world. And we’re not. Obviously we’re living in a Depression. Slow first 25% but then it … read more

Four short links: 18 April 2013

April 18 2013

The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto — I can’t assure with 100% certainty that the all the black dots are owned by Satoshi, but almost all are owned by a single entity, and that entity began mining right from … read more

Four short links: 17 April 2013

April 17 2013

Computer Software Archive (Jason Scott) — The Internet Archive is the largest collection of historical software online in the world. Find me someone bigger. Through these terabytes (!) of software, the whole of the software landscape of the last 50 … read more

Four short links: 16 April 2013

April 16 2013

Triage — iPhone app to quickly triage your email in your downtime. See also the backstory. Awesome UI. Webcam Pulse Detector — I was wondering how long it would take someone to do the Eulerian video magnification in real code. … read more

Four short links: 15 April 2013

April 15 2013

Know Your HTTP Posters (GitHub) — A0-posters about the HTTP protocol. Crowdserfing — when a large corp uses crowd-sourced volunteering for its own financial gain, without giving back. It offends my sense of reciprocity as well, but nobody is coerced … read more

Four short links: 12 April 2013

April 12 2013

Wikileaks ProjectK Code (Github) — open-sourced map and graph modules behind the Wikileaks code serving Kissinger-era cables. (via Journalism++) Plan Your Digital Afterlife With Inactive Account Manager — you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, … read more

Four short links: 11 April 2013

April 11 2013

A General Technique for Automating NES Games — software that learns how to play NES games and plays them automatically, using an aesthetically pleasing technique. With video, research paper, and code. rietveld — open source tool like Mondrian, Google’s code … read more

Four short links: 10 April 2013

April 10 2013

HyperLapse — this won the Internet for April. Everyone else can go home. Check out this unbelievable video and source is available. Housing Simulator — NZ’s largest city is consulting on its growth plan, and includes a simulator so you … read more

Four short links: 9 April 2013

April 09 2013

Automated Essay Grading To Come to EdX (NY Times) — shortly after we get software that writes stories for us, we get software to read them for us. AMD Calls End of Moore’s Law in Ten Years (ComputerWorld) — story … read more

Four short links: 8 April 2013

April 08 2013

mozpay — a JavaScript API inspired by google.payments.inapp.buy() but modified for things like multiple payment providers and carrier billing. When a web app invokes navigator.mozPay() in Firefox OS, the device shows a secure window with a concise UI. After authenticating, … read more

Four short links: 5 April 2013

April 05 2013

Millimetre-Accuracy 3D Imaging From 1km Away (The Register) — With further development, Heriot-Watt University Research Fellow Aongus McCarthy says, the system could end up both portable and with a range of up to 10 Km. See the paper for the … read more

Four short links: 4 April 2013

April 04 2013

geo-bootstrap — Twitter Bootstrap fork that looks like a classic geocities page. Because. (via Narciso Jaramillo) Digital Public Library of America — public libraries sharing full text and metadata for scans, coordinating digitisation, maximum reuse. See The Verge piece. (via … read more

Four short links: 3 April 2013

April 03 2013

Capn Proto — open source faster protocol buffers (binary data interchange format and RPC system). Saddle — a high performance data manipulation library for Sacala. Vega — a visualization grammar, a declarative format for creating, saving and sharing visualization designs. … read more

Four short links: 2 April 2013

April 02 2013

Analyzing mbostock’s queue.js — beautiful walkthrough of a small library, showing the how and why of good coding. What Job Would You Hire a Textbook To Do? (Karl Fisch) — notes from a Discovery Education “Beyond the Textbook” event. The … read more

Four short links: 1 April 2013

April 01 2013

MLDemos — an open-source visualization tool for machine learning algorithms created to help studying and understanding how several algorithms function and how their parameters affect and modify the results in problems of classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, dynamical systems and … read more

Four short links: 29 March 2013

March 29 2013

Titan 0.3 Out — graph database now has full-text, geo, and numeric-range index backends. Mozilla Security Community Do a Reddit AMA — if you wanted a list of sharp web security people to follow on Twitter, you could do a … read more

Four short links: 28 March 2013

March 28 2013

What American Startups Can Learn From the Cutthroat Chinese Software Industry — It follows that the idea of “viral” or “organic” growth doesn’t exist in China. “User acquisition is all about media buys. Platform-to-platform in China is war, and it … read more

Four short links: 27 March 2013

March 27 2013

The Effect of Group Attachment and Social Position on Prosocial Behavior (PLoSone) — notable, in my mind, for We conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 2,597 members of producer organizations in rural Uganda. cf the recently reported “rich are more selfish than … read more

Four short links: 26 March 2013

March 26 2013

Patent on Medical Trial Design to Reduce Placebo Effect — drug companies say these failures are happening not because their drugs are ineffective, but because placebos have recently become more effective in clinical trials. [...] The whole idea that placebo … read more

Four short links: 25 March 2013

March 25 2013

Analytics for Learning — Since doing good learning analytics is hard, we often do easy learning analytics and pretend that they are good instead. But pretending doesn’t make it so. (via Dan Meyer) Reproducible Research — a list of links … read more

Four short links: 22 March 2013

March 22 2013

Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards (EFF) — W3C is there to create comprehensible, publicly-implementable standards that will guarantee interoperability, not to facilitate an explosion of new mutually-incompatible software and of sites and services that can … read more

Four short links: 21 March 2013

March 21 2013

The Obfuscation of Culture — Tumblr and LJ users sep ar ate w ords thr ou gh o dd spacin g in o rde r to fo ol sea rc h en g i nes. Chinese users hide political messages … read more

Four short links: 20 March 2013

March 20 2013

Digital Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data (Scribd) — The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior of digital music consumers on the Internet. Using clickstream data on a panel of more than 16,000 European … read more

Four short links: 19 March 2013

March 19 2013

VizCities Dev Diary — step-by-step recount of how they brought London’s data to life, SimCity-style. Google Fibre Isn’t That Impressive — For [gigabit broadband] to become truly useful and necessary, we’ll need to see a long-term feedback loop of utility … read more

Four short links: 18 March 2013

March 18 2013

A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method (PDF) — This project was simultaneously an experiment in developing quantitative and computational methods for tracing changes in literary language. We wanted to see how far quantifiable … read more

Four short links: 15 March 2013

March 15 2013

Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment (PDF) — We find that new and infrequent users are positively influenced by ads but that existing loyal users whose purchasing behavior is not influenced by paid search account … read more

Four short links: 14 March 2013

March 14 2013

Our Weirdness is Free (Gabriella Coleman) — Often lacking an overarching strategy, Anonymous operates tactically, along the lines proposed by the French Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. “Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is … read more

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Nat Torkington