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.

Our regular series of lightning talks continues with our instalment of Semester 2 2009. Judged by John Haight of the Australian Computer Society and Julian Dermoudy of the School of Computing and Information System at UTAS, this session features talks on Twitter, Computer Vision, splicing MIDI files and more.

Also introduced this time are “surprise slides” talks, where the presenters were given an arbitrary deck of slides from which to present (these participants are marked with a * next to their title).

The running order is:

1. Andrew Bennett — Quack*
2. Alex Berry — Accelerating Towards Doom
3. Peter Billam — Midisox
4. Peter Lyle — Quack*
5. Matthew D’Orazio — How to ‘Sploit iTunes
6. Tim Nugent — My GPS is broken, and how to fix it*
7. Thomas Karpiniec — Twitter
8. Josh Deprez — Feigning It
9. Paris Buttfield-Addison — Developing Games for the iPhone*
10. Christopher Neugebauer — Applications in Computer Vision
11. Tony Gray — 15 Years of TonyEngine

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.