TUCS
The UTAS Computing Society

Hi all,

TUCS will be running a Tech Talk on Friday — we’ll also be trying to
precede that with a barbecue on the Grassy Knoll, starting at 1PM,
depensive on the weather being good.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Tech Talk: (MORE) PS3-related Ramblings

• Presenter: Jonathan Adamczewski
• Venue: Centenary 473
• Date: Fri. September 11 @ 14:00

Last time he rambled about drawing fractals with a PS3. This time, he’s rambling about the same thing.

Mandelbrot fractals are embarrassingly easy to parallelise, and while they look pretty, drawing them quickly is not - in the scheme of things - especially difficult. So, because he likes a challenge, Jonathan will be talking about his experiences in rendering the Buddhabrot (http://tr.im/bbrot) using the Cell BE processor, on the Playstation3.

With pretty pictures, complex mathematics and platform-targeted program decomposition, this talk will have something for everyone, perhaps.

TUCS will be running a lightning talks session on Friday May 29. This is an opportunity for members of the society (and the general public) to give a 3-minute talk on any topic they like, with or without the aid of slides.

People who give presentations will be eligible for bonus TUCS POINTS SCHEME Points, and it’s entirely possible that there will be prizes awarded for good talks!

What are Lightning Talks?

Lightning talks are a common feature of computing/IT-related conferences: attendees volunteer to give a short talk, at short notice. These talks are given in lightning talk sessions, which can be topic restricted (e.g. a “Python” lightning talks session), or can be general. At linux.conf.au, the general lightning talks session concludes the conference, held in the keynote venue, presented in front of all (~800) delegates.

TUCS is ran its first Lightning Talks session in 2008, as a way of concluding our first series of Tech Talks.

If you want to get a feel for what a Lightning Talks session is like, LCA2008’s was most excellent, and can be downloaded from this link (on AARNet, so should be super-quick from on campus). Unfortunately, TUCS’ 2008 Lightning Talks were not recorded, so you can’t sample them here.

Registration/More Info

Registrations for talks open today, so if you’re interested in finding out more information, or would like to sign up for a talk, find Chris Neugebauer in the Mac Lab (room 376, Centenary Building), or send an e-mail to tucs-exec@tucs.org.au.

Current Line-up

Here’s a list of people who’ve signed up for talks so far (note please that this isn’t the final order for presentations on the day — see rule 7 for details.):

1. Paris Buttfield-Addison: The Power of Fist. Thank you. That is all.
2. Alex Berry: An Alternative to IPv6
3. Michael Ford: Thrust
4. Thomas Karpiniec: “What time is it, Eccles?” An Introduction to Network Time Protocol
5. Josh Deprez: Abusing the Banach-Tarski Paradox for Fun and Profit
6. Chris Neugebauer: Cocomo: An Accessible Mac API for Maclabbers.
7. Andrew Bennett: The Grand Wizard
8. Nic Wittison: The Internet: A brief History of Meme.
9. Simon Arneaud: Magical Girl Anime as a Means of Self-induced Brain Damage
10. Matthew D’Orazio: Why computers don’t work.
11. Tim Nugent: Warbl Whizzle and other as-yet unconfirmed things.
12. John Haight: ACS Spiel
13. Jon Manning: Unity
14. Peter Lyle: OpenTTD Signals

Rules of the event

In these rules, “The Talks Organiser” is Chris Neugebauer.

1. Talks will last three minutes at maximum. This will be strictly enforced (possibly via manual intervention!)
2. Talks must be registered (with a topic) with the Talks organiser, before the talks session begins — preferably before 12:30PM, May 29, if you want to use slides.
3. There will be time for at most 15 talks, the first registered talks will be the ones presented.
4. Slides may be used: They must be in PDF format (no exceptions!) with no scripts or embedded active components (e.g. motion video or audio), and e-mailed to (and viewable by) the organiser by 12:30PM, Friday 29 May.
5. There is no rule 5.
6. Talk topics and content should be suitable for a general audience: in particular, content of violent or pornographic nature will not be tolerated. If you’re not sure, ask.
7. The order of talks will not be those listed above: a random order of talks will be selected on the day.
8. Only one talk on any given topic will be accepted.
9. Only one talk by any given person will be accepted.

Video from this talk is now available to view or download, courtesy of Google Video.

Talk Details:

• Speaker: Christopher Neugebauer
• Skill Level: Any, Python knowledge desirable but not necessary

In October 2008, two new releases of Python will be unleashed on a mostly-suspecting public: Python 2.6, a continuation of the current Python series, and 3.0 (also known as Python3000), the release in which the Python Developers break your code, confuse your development processes, cause global chaos, destruction, and other exaggerated, not-generally-nice things.

In this talk, I’ll quickly cover some advanced Python techniques in the hope of making the rest of the talk more bearable; I’ll then discuss new additions to Python appearing in 2.6 and 3.0, the backwards-incompatible changes introduced in 3.0, and overview of the process of porting code from Python 2.6 to 3.x. The talk will be aimed at people who don’t necessarily have experience in Python, with a focus on learning Python in a world with parallel releases.

TUCS will be holding its first ever Lightning Talks session on October 15th. This is an opportunity for members of the society (and the general public) to give a 3-minute talk on any topic they like, with or without the aid of slides.

People who give presentations will be eligible for bonus TUCS POINTS SCHEME Points, and it’s entirely possible that there will be prizes awarded for good talks!

What are Lightning Talks?

Lightning talks are a common feature of computing/IT-related conferences: attendees volunteer to give a short talk, at short notice. These talks are given in lightning talk sessions, which can be topic restricted (e.g. a “Python” lightning talks session), or can be general. At linux.conf.au, the general lightning talks session concludes the conference, held in the keynote venue, presented in front of all (~800) delegates.

TUCS is running a Lightning Talks session for the first time in 2008, as a way of concluding our first series of Tech Talks.

If you want to get a feel for what a Lightning Talks session is like, LCA2008’s was most excellent, and can be downloaded from this link (on AARNet, so should be super-quick from on campus).

Registration/More Info

Registrations for talks open today, so if you’re interested in finding out more information, or would like to sign up for a talk, find Chris Neugebauer in the Mac Lab, or send an e-mail to ids-exec@ids.org.au.

Current Line-up

Here’s a list of people who’ve signed up for talks so far (note please that this isn’t the final order for presentations on the day — see rule 7 for details.):

1. Thomas Karpiniec - A Linux Falsehood
2. John Swanson - Advice-Taking Reinforcement Learning
3. Michael Cordover - Secure Password Storage
4. Joshua Deprez - “On the School of Computing
   (and Information Systems) brackets intentional”
5. Carl Haynes - Introduction to Latex (or LaTeX).
6. Alex Berry - #define
7. Tim Nugent - Constructing your own Laser Guns, for laser skirmish not for melting poor fools or carving titanium or liquefying base defences.
8. Andrew Bennett - Weird Computing Topics
9. Jon Manning - Making a Lan Manager using CakePHP and jQuery
10. Leah Duncan - Linux.conf.au 2009
11. Tony Gray - Who is Lab Guy?

Rules of the event

In these rules, “The Talks Organiser” is Chris Neugebauer.

1. Talks will last three minutes at maximum. This will be strictly enforced (possibly via manual intervention!)
2. Talks must be registered (with a topic) with the Talks organiser, by Tuesday 14 October.
3. There will be time for at most 15 talks, the first registered talks will be the ones presented.
4. Slides may be used: They must be in PDF format (no exceptions!), and e-mailed to the organiser by 12:30PM, Wednedsday 15 October.
5. There is no rule 5.
6. Talk topics and content should be suitable for a general audience: in particular, content of violent or pornographic nature will not be tolerated. If you’re not sure, ask.
7. The order of talks will not be those listed above: a random order of talks will be selected on the day.
8. Only one talk on any given topic will be accepted.

Our second tech talk for semester 2, 2008 on Strategy Gaming Concepts, presented by Alex Berry is now available online.

The talk was certainly one of our best-attended so far, but if you missed it, it’s well worth checking out. Aplogies for the low video quality, and the audio is slightly lacking in certain places, but it’s otherwise reasonably good.

Video is available for online streaming via Google Video: you can download the video for watching offline (or on your iPod) from the page.

–Chris

TUCS Had our Semester 2 launch today, including a barbecue and two short tech talks.

The two talks given by Chris are now available to view or download on Google Video:

• TUCS Semester 2 Introduction including TUCS Points Scheme announcement.
• You’re Doing it Wrong!

Unfortunately, Jon did not record his presentation on Pretty Things for the Lazy, but slides will be available in the near future.