"Moving Forward with Complexity" has now been published. It’s the proceedings of a successful conference that I ran with Kurt Richardson in the summer of 2010. Yes, I know—it takes time. … [Read more...]

The BBC just posted an article asking, "Is technology to blame for the London riots?" No, it is not. … [Read more...]

The special double issue of "Emergence: Complexity & Organization" that I edited with Kurt Richardson is out now. The theme is "Complexity & Real-World Applications". It's the result of a successful conference that we ran, under the same title, in Southampton, England last summer. … [Read more...]

It's always entertaining to read predictions about the future—once the "future" has come to pass. Take "The Internet? Bah!", published by Newsweek in 1995. Two gems: "Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure." "So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the … [Read more...]

Just created my first e-book (EPUB and Mobipocket/Kindle) from one of my articles. I used the excellent Calibre e-book management tool. Why? Well, as more people get e-book readers (and that obviously includes smartphones) they're likely to turn to content that works on those devices. Speaking personally, I'm much more likely to casually read longer content (articles/books) if I can store it on … [Read more...]

An occassional acquaintance of mine died unexpectedly last month. He was an avid user of social media and had all sorts of free accounts set up to do things like locate stories based on keywords and tweet the links. He also published an automated "newspaper" (feed aggregation) using the Paper.li service. So…thing is…I still regularly receive information from him—complete with his … [Read more...]

Train company Southeastern have come in for a lot of criticism over the way they have handled the snow this week. Not only have they run severely reduced services, but their communication has been pretty much non-existent (again). When I used the on-platform intercom to ask about schedules, I had the normal timetable related to me. Fantastic. After struggling to find out if I'd be able to … [Read more...]

I'm obsessive about one-touch builds. Having more than one step in your build process is just asking for trouble. Hence a good build tool is an essential part of my development arsenal. Sticker shock at the upgrade price for my current GUI-based build tool pushed me to take a detailed look at MSBuild—Microsoft's build platform. I'd been meaning to look at at it anyway, and this was the push I … [Read more...]

I'm surprised by how much I'm using the iPad after such a short period of time. It's the form factor, I think. Before, I was compromising on location to use my laptop/netbook comfortably. Now I go where I want. One of the areas where the iPad has really changed my behaviour is in the consumption of news. I was previously an intermittent user of RSS feeds. However, I now pretty much consume … [Read more...]