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Nat Torkington

Biography

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.

Books

Perl Cookbook Perl Cookbook
by Tom Christiansen , Nat Torkington
Second Edition August 2003
Print: $49.95
Ebook: $39.99
Bundle: $64.94
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(Read Reviews)

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

Blog

Recent Posts | All Posts

Four short links: 3 July 2009

July 02 2009

OECD Factbook -- Flash-built impressive data explorer from OECD. Go to Indicators > Load and, in the words of Ben Goldacre, "prepare for nerdgasm". (via bengoldacre on Twitter) James Boyle is on Twitter -- author of the book The Public Domain. Sewers and Startups (Pete Warden) -- designing to last,… read more

Four short links: 1 July 2009

July 01 2009

The Onyas -- New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from "good on ya", the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give. The Year of Business Metrics: Don't make your users run away!… read more

Four short links: 30 June 2009

June 30 2009

Military Open Source Software Conference -- 12-13 August 2009 in Atlanta. Govloop -- a "Social Network for Gov 2.0". Gov 2.0 could easily become the intersection of talk radio and social media consultant inanity. As with the Web 2.0 lunacy, when everyone who could spell wiki tried to sell one,… read more

Four short links: 2 July 2009

June 30 2009

UNESCO book: Open Educational Resources -- UNESCO's first openly licensed publication, a collection of papers and reports in the area of Open Educational Resources. (via glynmoody on Twitter) ETSI 2.0 -- Paul Downey ventures into the belly of the telco beast and gives them both barrels. The whole thing is… read more

Four short links: 29 June 2009

June 29 2009

Server Fault -- Wikipedia-like sysadmin guide, built by the Stack Overflow team, who are branching out to reach a more general IT Professional audience. (via Brady in email) Sixty Symbols -- 5m videos about the symbols of physics and astronomy. Great stuff! (via Glutnix on Twitter) US National Archives launches… read more

Four short links: 25 June 2009

June 25 2009

How an Indie Musician Can Make $19,000 in 10 Hours Using Twitter -- as Zoe Keating pointed out: "cash made by @amandapalmer in one month on Twitter = $19,000; cash made by @amandapalmer from 30,000 record sales = $0". The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of… read more

Four short links: 26 June 2009

June 25 2009

Size vs Growth vs Acceleration (Rowan Simpson) -- you can tell how well a company is doing by the basis on which they report their progress. Engineers Are The Best Deal, So Stock Up On Them (TechCrunch) -- Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were… read more

Four short links: 24 June 2009

June 24 2009

The Digital Open -- The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers. Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian's Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment -- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun.… read more

Four short links: 23 June 2009

June 23 2009

Easter Eggs for Real Life (Neil Gaiman) -- ok, I know easter eggs are already part of real life, but this is still cool. Gaiman recommends a restaurant run by a friend, and the friend has set up a special phrase that to mention to the server, at which point… read more

Four short links: 22 June 2009

June 22 2009

Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years -- to put it another way, the half-life of friendship is 7 years. (via zephoria on delicious) Crowdsourced Car Design -- an interesting approach, and I can imagine it being described as "threadless for cars". (via timoreilly on Twitter) Australian Gov 2.0… read more

Four short links: 19 June 2009

June 19 2009

Inside-Out Multiplication Table -- very cool way to view the patterns of factors. Math is beauty with subscripts. High-Speed Camera -- capture 100 frames at up to 1M frames/second. The sample videos, of a bullet liquefying on impact and a shotgun string boiling past, are stunning. The Makezine high-speed photography… read more

Four short links: 18 June 2009

June 18 2009

Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society (Michael Geist) -- Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." This is consistent with the authors' view that weaker copyright is "uambiguously desirable if it does… read more

Four short links: 17 June 2009

June 17 2009

NY Times Mines Its Data To Identify Words That Readers Find Abstruse -- the feature that lets you highlight a word on a NY Times web page and get more information about it is something that irritates me. I'm fascinated by the analysis of their data: boggling that sumptuary is… read more

Four short links: 16 June 2009

June 16 2009

Dealing with Election Results Data -- taking the raw UK European election data into Google's Fusion Tables to try and make sense of it. More cloud-based tools for the data scientist within. (via Simon Willison) Time for an Open 311 API -- "311" is the US number to call for… read more

Four short links: 15 June 2009

June 15 2009

More Talk Less Chalk -- wordy slides that duplicate what the speaker says make it harder to learn. [R]esults indicate that participants exposed to lexically sparse slides had better recall of thematic content, suggesting that deeper encoding occurs when working memory demands are reduced, and that this may be achieved… read more

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Nat Torkington