TUCS
The UTAS Computing Society

The annual TUCS spit roast will be once again held on the final day of semester. Join us for more meat than you can handle – beef, pork, lamb; and booze!

Officially starting at 4 PM Friday the 17th day of October at the Amphitheatre (behind the Arts lecture theatre).

Cost will be $15 for meat, $5 for booze (should you want it).

Join in the Internet Meme Karaoke! (Suggestions to Winton via maclab.thewintonet.com)

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

Remeber: TUCS LAN on the 30th of August in the usual location on the bottom floor of the Law Building.

30th August
Law room 131
1100 Saturday -> Sunday
$10

Our LAN Page has some possibly useful information including a map of the LAN’s location if you’ve not been before.

As part of the TUCS Point Scheme those who attend (and pay up) will earn points towards a chance to win an iPod (or bacon). We will also be running a few team games throughout the LAN for further points.

(Aside: I’m hoping that that this time we will be able to get some Team Fortress 2 going so ensure that your Steam is updated and offline-ready. You know how finnicky it can be.)

- Michael Ford

(Semester 2 2008)

• August 30th
• October 4th
• November 15th (Post Exams)

For more information on LANs see the LAN page.

Hello all,

For the benefit of all of you who didn’t show up, or showed up late to
the TUCS Tech Talks yesterday:

The FANTASTIC new TUCS POINTS SCHEME!!!!

NEW! AMAZING! INCREDIBLE!!!!!!

How does it work?

1) Every TUCS Member gets a membership sticker to go on the back of
their student ID card.
2) TUCS Members show up to TUCS Events
3) The TUCS Executive issue TUCS POINTS SCHEME Points.

It’s INCREDIBLE!

At the end of Semester 2, TUCS POINTS SCHEME Points will be converted
into tickets for the TUCS POINTS SCHEME raffle. There will be prizes
issued to people contained in the first three people joined:

1st Prize: Someting AMAZING donated by our INCREDIBLE Sponsors.
2nd Prize: There is no second prize.
3rd Prize: Bacon. Mmm. We like bacon.

The person with the most points will be awarded the <insert NAMING
RIGHTS SPONSOR HERE> TUCS POINTS SCHEME Perpetual Trophy.

Bonus points will be issued to members who participate in and help out
with events (instead of merely attending)… WOW!

So… Come to our events for this semester, and get your TUCS POINTS
SCHEME Points.

Thanks,

– The TUCS Executive

P.S. This message is available in slightly more coherent form at:
http://www.tucs.org.au/membership/tucs-points-scheme/

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.

As part of our launch weekend, TUCS held its first tech talk, which, incidentally was delivered by me. The topic was Introductory Python.

I recorded the talk, with a screen dump, which is now available to view in your browser, thanks to Google Video, the video follow at the bottom of this post. You can also download the video.

Also available is a Flickr Stream from the talk.

You may have noticed some changes happening in IDS. At our AGM in March, we changed our name to the TUU Computing Society, or TUCS. We’re having several launch events next week to help kick off the new society… we hope you can join us:

Friday, May 2, 1 PM.
TUCS Tech Talk: Introductory Python
Speaker: Chris Neugebauer
Venue: Seminar Room, Level 4, Centenary Building

In this talk, we’ll demonstrate how to program in Python, a powerful, general purpose programming language, which is easy to learn, makes it easy to solve all sorts of practical problems, with an emphasis on making programming fun.

http://www.tucs.org.au/events/tech-talks/#python

In coming weeks we will be hosting more tech talks, so stay tuned.

Friday, May 2: 2 PM
TUCS Launch BBQ
Venue: Grassy Knoll outside the Centenary Building
Cost: Free for Members

We’re having a barbecue for members of TUCS. Bring your friends, they can sign up for $10 for student membership, $15 for staff.

Saturday, May 3: 10AM
TUCS LAN
Venue: Law 133
Cost: $10 for members

LAN runs from 10AM on Saturday until Sunday morning. A barbecue lunch will be provided.

Hope we can see you at the Launch.

– The TUCS Executive

As per the e-mail sent out to the University this week, there is a possibility of the TUCS server undergoing an outage on Friday, April 9:00AM for up to three hours.

Please ensure that you are doing nothing important on your shell accounts/etc at this time, and apologies in advance for the outage.

–Chris