Summer: the sparrows whistle through the teapot-steam breeze. The ubiquitous construction team tears the same pavement up for the third time, hammering passers-by with dust and noise: our shirts, worn for the third time, noisome from competing heat and shame. As Nature continues her Keynesian rotation of policy, and as society decrees yet another parting of ways, it is proper for the common victims to have an evening to themselves, looking both back and ahead, imagining new opportunities, and recognising those long since missed. God fucking damn it.
This term's CTRL-D end-of-term dinner is taking place tomorrow (Saturday) at 7:00 P.M. at East Side Mario's, in the plaza. Meet in the C.S.C. fifteen minutes beforehand, so they don't take away our seats or anything nasty like that.
A lot of people wanted to go to the Mongolian Grill, but I'm pretty sure this place has a similar price-to-tasty ratio; what's more, they'll actually grant us a reservation more than four nights a week. I've confirmed that the crazy allergenic peanuts no longer exist (sad), and they have a good vegetarian selection, which is likely coincides with their kosher and halal menus.
Come out for the tasty and the awesome! If you pretend it's your birthday, everyone's a loser! Tell your friends, because I told the telephone I wanted to reserve for 10 to 12 people, and I don't wish to sully Calum T. Dalek's good name!
Come out for some retro Amiga-style Lemmings gaming action!
Does being in CS make you feel like a lemming? Is linear algebra driving you into walls? Do you pace back and forth, constantly, regardless of whatever's in your path? Then you should come out to CSC Lemmings Day. This time, we're playing the pseudo-sequel: Oh No! More Lemmings!
The Computer Science Club is once again stepping forward to fulfill its ancient duty to the people-this time by installing one of the many fine distributions of Linux for you.
Ubuntu? Debian? Gentoo? Fedora? We might not have them all, but we seem to have an awful lot! Bring your boxen down to the D.C. Fishbowl for the awesome!
Install Linux on your machine-install fear in your opponents!
or How communities of interest drive modern software development.
Simon Law leads the Quality teams for Ubuntu, a free-software operating system built on Debian GNU/Linux. As such, he leads one of the largest community-based testing efforts for a software product. This does get a bit busy sometimes.
In this talk, we'll be exploring how the Internet is changing how software is developed. Concepts like open source and technologies like message forums are blurring the lines between producer and consumer. And this melting pot of people is causing people to take note, and changing the way they sling code.
Co-Sponsored with CS-Commons Committee
The Computer Science Club will be showing March of the Penguins
March of the Penguins , an epic nature documentary, as dictated by some guy with a funny voice is being shown by the Computer Science club because penguins are cute and were bored [that and the whole Linux awareness week that forgot to tell people about].
Albert O'Connor will be introducing the joys of programming in python
Albert O'Connor, a UW grad, will be giving a ~30 minute talk on introducing the joys of programming python. Python is an open source object-oriented programming language which is most awesome.
Alex Tsay will look at the common hack used to simulate multi-processing in a real time embedded environment.
In an embedded environment resources are fairly limited, especially. Typically an embedded system has strict time constraints in which it must respond to hardware driven interrupts and do some processing of its own. A full fledged OS would consume most of the available resources, hence crazy hacks must be used to get the benefits without paying the high costs. This talk will look at the common hack used to simulate multi-processing in a real time embedded environment.
Simon Woodside, founder of Semacode, comes to discuss image what it is like to start a business and how imaging code works
Could you write a good image recognizer for a 100 MHz mobile phone processor with 1 MB heap, 320x240 image, on a poorly-optimized Java stack? It needs to locate and read two-dimensional barcodes made up of square modules which might be no more than a few pixels in size. We had to do that in order to establish Semacode, a local start up company that makes a software barcode reader for cell phones. The applications vary from ubiquitous computing to advertising. Simon Woodside (founder) will discuss what it's like to start a business and how the imaging code works.
Come out to discuss current & future plans/projects for the Club
The Computer Science Club (CSClub) has "new" DEC Alphas which are most awesome. Come out, help take them part, put them back together, solder, and eat free food (probably pizza).
Come out to discuss current & future plans/projects for the Club
The venue will include:
Computer usage agreement discussion (Holden has some changes he'd like to propose)
Web site - Juti is redesigning the web site (you can see a beta here - ideas are welcome.
Frosh Linux cd's that could be put in frosh math faculty kits.
VoIP "not phone services" ideas.
Ideas for talks (people, topics, etc...). We requested Steve Jobs and Steve Balmer, so no idea is too crazy.
Ideas for books.
General improvements/comments for the club.
If you have ideas, but can't attend, please email them to president@csclub.uwaterloo.ca and they will be read them at the meeting.
Eighteen Years in the Software Tools Business at Microsoft, a talk by Rico Mariani, (BMath CS/EEE 1988)
Rico Mariani, (BMath CS/EEE 1988) now an (almost) 18 year Microsoft veteran but then a CSC president comes to talk to us about the evolution of software tools for microcomputers. This talk promises to be a little bit about history and perspective (at least from the Microsoft side of things) as well as the evolution of software engineers, different types of programmers and their needs, and what it's like to try to make the software industry more effective at what it does, and sometimes succeed!
A video of the talk is available for download in our media section.
Have you heard of our famous Unix 101 and Unix 102 tutorials. We've decided to try and put them on the web. This Sunday we will be doing a first take. At the same time, we're going to be looking at adding new material that we haven't covered in the past.
Why should you come out? Not only will you get to hang out with a wonderful group of people, you can help impart your knowledge to the world. Don't know anything about Unix? That's cool too, we need people to make sure its easy to follow along and hopefully keep us from leaving something out by mistake.
We don't know Video 4 Linux, but increasingly people are wanting to do interesting stuff with our webcam which could benefit from a better understanding of Video 4 Linux. So, this Saturday a number of us will be trying to learn as much as possible about Video 4 Linux and doing weird things with webcam(s).
The Computer Science Club will be holding its elections for the Spring 2006 term on Monday, May 8th. The elections will be held at 4:30 PM in the Comfy Lounge, on the 3rd floor of the MC. Please remember to come out and vote!
We are accepting nominations for the following positions: President, Vice-President, Treasurer, and Secretary. The nomination period continues until 4:30 PM on Sunday, May 7th. If you are interested in running for a position, or would like to nominate someone else, please email cro@csclub.uwaterloo.ca before the deadline.