TUCS
The UTAS Computing Society

Presenter: Christopher Neugebauer
Friday August 13 at 1PM
Centenary Lecture Theatre

The Python Programming Language has always allowed rapid development
of applications for a wide variety of systems, including Windows, Linux and
Mac OS X. ;You may have coded in Python before, but as a
constantly-evolving language, the Python that you learnt a few years ago is
probably not the best possible Python that you could write today.

This talk shows how to write better and safer Python code more quickly
by taking advantages of recent features that appear in Python 2.6.

Presenters: Nick Ham & Jet Holloway
When: Friday March 26, 2010 @ 13:00
Venue: Centenary Lecture Theatre

Abstract: ;Towards the end of summer, the

LCA2010 was held in Wellington, New Zealand in January this year, and
once again lived up to its reputation as the best Free and Open Source
Software Conference in our region. ;I’ll be sharing my experience of
the conference, including the latest developments in the FOSS world,
in the true spirit of Creative Commons licensing: by presenting my
favourite slides from the presentations made at the conference.

Speaker: Paul Fenwick

Facebook. Your friends are using it. Your workmates are using it. Chances are youre using it. Facebook is already well known one of the worlds most popular social networking platforms, but its also rapidly becoming one of the worlds most popular application platforms too.

The popularity of Facebook applications is unsurprising. Theyre easy to write, as well as being easy to share and install. However most users remain unaware of what information can be accessed by their applications, and more surprisingly, by their friends applications.

Join researcher Paul Fenwick as he examines just how much information he can extract from friends using only the Facebook API.

Speaker: Paul Fenwick

The average individual is given little scope for failure, at least not the type that really matters. The opportunity for catastrophic failure, that influences nations or continents, has been traditionally reserved for royalty, parliament, and others in a position of great leadership.

However in recent times we have developed a profession who have the opportunity to fail like never before. A profession that can make mistakes that are so monumental, so wide-reaching, and so costly they can shake civilisation to its very core. This elite group, rarely seen by every day society, are the foundation upon which modern society depends. The few, the proud, the Software Developers.

Join us for a voyage of discovery as we examine some of the worlds greatest software failures, from ancient times to modern day.

• Title: How to Use Your Camera Phone, Properly
• Presenter: Christopher Neugebauer
• Venue: Centenary 473 (Hobart), V137 (Launceston)
• Time: Friday, September 18, 14:00

This talk is about how to take good pictures with a camera phone, focusing on some simple compositional techniques applicable to many camera phones, including Apples iPhone. Well also look at some of the features that have crept into the recent iPhone revision, what its marketed features actually do, and how you can exploit them. This will be followed by…

• Title: Why CAPTCHAs are Not So Awesome
• Presenter: Simon Arneaud

CAPTCHAs have a reputation for being slightly annoying for users but highly effective at preventing access to bots. The reality is that the opposite is true for many CAPTCHA systems.

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, hes 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 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.

• Presenter: Tony Gray
• Venue: Centenary 473
• Time: Friday, August 28, 14:00

Modern CPUs are so fast that they can comfortably emulate systems from the early days of the personal computer in software alone, and there are freely available open-source emulators for almost all of the early systems, such as the Apple II and Commodore 64. But writing your own emulator is a heck of a lot more fun than using someone elses – it can be a great personal challenge, its a terrific way to learn and understand the technology of modern computer systems, and it will totally earn you at least one kudos. This talk covers the process of writing an emulator from first principals, and is unlikely to include any references to bacon.

Date: Friday, 14th of August, 2009 at 2:00-3:00
Location: Hobart – room 473 Centenary Building, Launceston room V137

TUCS' Forthnightly Tech Talks are back for this week, and for the first time, we'll be performing a trial videoconference of our Tech Talk with Launceston. We look forward to welcoming our cross-campus friends to our society!

Talk 1: Alex, Chris and Michael's ACM Adventure. Presenters: Alex Berry, Chris Neugebauer, Michael Ford

In April, three CIS students competed in the World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in Stockholm, Sweden. For this talk, as well as showing off our holiday snaps from the trip, we'll be talking about how we went about preparing for the contest, our experience competing in the contest itself, and how we coped with the copious amounts of ABBA provided by the sponsors.

Talk 2: A Talk on Topicality. Presenter: Alex Berry

Alex Berry presents a talk about things and stuff, specifically, how to write concentrated C++ code and an introduction to E-Sports.