I'm happy to say that I am going to be talking at the 2010 Virt3c@Hull, at Hull University.  Keynote speakers include; Gabriella Coleman on 'Cabals, Crisis, and Conflict on the Virtual Frontier' (Friday) and Mathieu O’Neil on 'Theory and Practice of Online Research: Power, Expertise, Critique' (Sat).  My talk is part of the session entitled 'Conflicts in Open & Free Software Communities' on Sat 20th March, 12.00- 1.45:

I've just been passed a couple of links to the code-swarm system. It's a method a visualising the development process of a software project – and it's pretty amazing looking! What this system does is use the commit process (aka check-in) of software development to track the additions to a software project. This is where a developer takes a copy from the central control one of the source files and adds to it, then places it back into the repository.

There is a considerable amount of internal competition in biology. By this I mean that internal to an organism, it can compete within its self to produce the best 'goods'. So for example some plants will abort the growth of fruit where it does not have enough seeds. One could see this as a form of internal-competition between possible fruits so that only the fittest has the resources to grow it to full term, is used.

It is an oft quoted true-ism that the original of a film is the best and sequels often fail to capture the magic of the original. Examples like Blues Brothers :) then Blues Brothers 2000 :( or Matrix :) then Reloaded :( spring to mind. It is easy to think of films who's sequel/s was worse than the original and quite a challenge to think of films who sequel is equal or indeed better than the original.

I'm speaking at an event next week at the PM Studio in Bristol on Wed 16th at 4pm and the event is free!

Software Paleontology - Tomas Rawlings (Fluffy Logic & DCRC PhD Student)
Tomas is on a GWR PhD scholarship applying evolutionary theory to peer to peer networks. As part of this research Tomas has developed a unique methodology of ‘software paleontology’ comparing the change logs of P2P software versions to the fossil records of  biological evolution.

I had an interesting email discussion with Ernesto (the Editor-in-Chief of TorrentFreak) about my last post on the blog and thought I'd reproduce some of it here (with his permission of course!)...

We are used to seeing family trees in biology.  For example this is the human family tree:

I have just been reading an interesting article on vestigial organs - structures within the body that now have a different or indeed no remaining function.  Examples might include the appendix in humans - which is the remains of an organ that would have, in the distant past, been used to digest cellulose foods such as grass or the little nub-like wings of the kiwi.  The theory of evolution predicts that one will find vestigial DNA - and so we have;

This is an interesting interview with Niles Eldredge of the City University of New York.  It's a very good account of looking at both the parallels and the differences between biological evolution and the idea of cultural and/or technological evolution.  First off he takes on the issue that in biological evolution we have DNA linking and encoding the information from one generation to the next:

I thought that I would revisit an old (Aug 2003!!) article by Clay Shirky.  This article lays out the central idea that started me on this path of research; about how networks respond to an attack;