TUCS
The UTAS Computing Society

Yes, we’ve finally moved into the latter half of the first 10% of the 21st century! TUCS Tech Talks for 2009 are now online and being podcasted for your convenience.

The podcast is currently available in the convenient formats of .FLV and whatever the presenter chose at the time (generally quicktime).

Formats

• Standard RSS (anything but iTunes)
• iTunes

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.

TUCS LANs for semester one 2009 will be held on the following dates:

• Sat. 21st March
• Sat. 25th April
• Post-exams (TBA)

LANs are, for the time being, in the usual place at the usual time.

See the LAN information page for more information.

Edit 4/3: Note that the day of the March LAN has been moved forward a week to the 21st to avoid conflict with Dark Media LAN

After a period of extraordinary downtime the TUCS server is back online. All web hosting is back and the remaining services will be returning shortly.

Our server of many years had a haemorrhage and had to be put down. It has been replaced with a beastly new server made of redundancy and win. Backups have been tediously restored to the new server.

We apologise for the down time and don’t anticipate anything of this nature happening again for the next few years, touch wood.

On November 15th, at LAN, we had our AGM (as you would probably be
aware from the announcements

At said AGM the TUCS Executive was announced for 2009. The exec currently consists of:

• President: Chris Neugebauer
• Vice-President: Paris Buttfield-Addison
• Treasurer: Michael Ford
• Secretary: Jon Manning
• General Representatives: Nic Wittison, Luke Hovington

Two more general representative positions will be offered for election, along with up to two staff representatives, at a special general meeting, early in 2009.

Thanks to those that were elected for volunteering and here’s to a
bigger, better 2009 than our successful 2008.

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.

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.