<About a year later I had to write a paper. One of the disadvantages of being a researcher is that in order to get money you have to write a paper about something or other, the paper is never about what currently interests you at the moment, but must be about what the project that financed your research expects to read about.
Well I had my gossip network setup on planet lab and I could tell it to become anything, so I told it to become a content distribution networks and used a gossip algorithm to make copies of the same file on all machine on the network and wrote a paper about it and everybody was happy.>
I miss Joe, not that I ever met him, but his attitude and good humour are inspiring.
Wow, thanks for posting this! I've never used Erlang before, but the "become" functionality and the message-passing style is similar enough to another actor-model system I'm familiar with (Spritely Goblins) that I was inspired to write a version of this program for it:
