Events Archive: Winter 2018

Alt-Tab: W18

| 6:00 PM EDT | MC 4020

CSC will be hosting our termly Alt-Tab event, the Computer Science version of Short Attention Span Math Seminars (SASMS) hosted by that math club down the hall. It will be a night full of friendly talks.

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Our current lineup includes:

  • Ifaz Kabir: Efficient Type Inference with Union Find
  • Jordan Garside: GraphQL and APIs
  • Sean Harrap: Implementing Structs Almost From Scratch
  • Ashish Gaurav: Teaching Programs to play Simple Games
  • Jennifer Zhou: Garbage Collection Concepts
  • Lessons Learned from Cross-Compiling Rust

Uncode Party with WiCS

| 7:00 PM EDT | QNC 2502

We are having a joint Code Party with Women in Computer Science (WiCS). This time, it's an Uncode Party, where you try to find the worst solutions possible to programming problems that we will provide.

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An example of a good "bad" solution is SlowSort. Come and write shoddy code with us and eat free food. You can work on your assignments too. No general meeting will be bundled with this event.

Prof Talk with Richard Mann

| 6:00 PM EDT | MC 4059

Professor Richard Mann will be giving a talk on black-box testing of audio gear. Come out to see fancy audio gear, learn more about his Advanced Topics course in Computational Sound, and eat free food! Click through for his abstract.

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Black box testing usually refers to computer testing, either software or hardware.

In this talk I apply similar ideas to testing analog and digital audio gear. For example, given an audio device, such as a guitar effects pedal, can we stimulate the system with test signals and determine what processing is done inside?

I will present our open source testing software to test the frequency response, time delay and distortion in audio systems. We will show several real world testing situations, including microphones, loud speakers, digital keyboards, digital audio mixing boards, and guitar effects pedals.

Students are encouraged to bring their own musical instruments and/or sound processors for testing.

Finally, I will present information about my current audio course, CS489/689 -- Advanced Topics in Computer Science -- Computational Sound. This is a project based course, normally offered in the Winter term.

Discussion with maddog

| 6:00 PM EDT | MC Comfy

We'll be having a discussion session with maddog, an out-of-town speaker from the LPI. Food will be provided, as well as good company. Come out!

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Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International, an association of computer users who wish to support and promote the Linux Operating System. During his career in commercial computing which started in 1969 (almost a half-century ago), Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, educator, and consultant.

He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, SGI and Futura Networks (Campus Party).

Mr. Hall is currently the CEO of OptDyn, Inc (www.optdyn.com) which creates the Subutai(tm) suite of Open Source Peer-to-Peer Cloud computing tools. He also works as an independent consultant, and is involved with bringing environmentally friendly computing to emerging marketplaces, as well as working on performance and educational issues with Free and Open Source Software via the Linaro Association. He is the Chairman Emeritus of wit.com

Mr Hall has worked on many systems, both proprietary and open, having concentrated on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994 (almost a quarter century ago), when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software.

He has taught at Hartford State Technical College, Merrimack College and Daniel Webster College. He still likes talking to students over pizza and beer (the pizza can be optional).

Mr. Hall is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, many presentations and one book, "Linux for Dummies". He currently writes a monthly article for Linux Pro Magazine and occasionally blogs for them on their web site.

Mr. Hall has consulted with the governments of China, Malaysia and Brazil as well as the United Nations and many local and state governments on the use of Free and Open Source Software.

Mr. Hall has served and serves on the boards of several companies, universities and several non-profit organizations. He is currently very active with the University of Sao Paulo's Centro Interdisciplinar Em Tecnologias Interativas (CITI), acting as a member of their advisory board. Mr. Hall is also the Board Chair of the Linux Professional Institute, the world's premier Open Source Certification organization, and is the senior advisor and co-founder of Caninos Loucos, bringing inexpensive, locally designed and manufactured single board computers to Brazil. He is also the President of Project Caua.

Mr. Hall has traveled the world (over 100 countries) speaking on the benefits of Free and Open Source Software, and received his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University (1973), and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York (1977).

Programming for the 22nd Century

| 6:00 PM EDT | MC Comfy

We are bringing an out-of-town speaker, John "maddog" Hall, to come speak! Come to this event, where he will be talking about changes in programming paradigms since the invention of C, and the discussion event tomorrow.

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Abstract: Many things have changed since the early days of programming, but many programs are written as if they were for the machines of the 20th century which had small memories, no cache, single core CPUs, small address spaces. Even the definition of "performance" has changed. This talk will investigate some of these issues and hopefully lead people to better programming.

Technical Interview Prep

| 5:30 PM EST | QNC 1502

Our first workshop of the term! Fatema and Arshia will be heading a workshop on how to prepare for technical interviews.Got technical interviews? Come out!

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Details and abstract TBA. So far, we're going to be meeting and going over how to get really good at technical interviews.

We will:

  • Talk about the different kinds of programming jobs you can apply and interview for
  • Present some general advice for tech interviews
  • have sessions in parallel for software engineering, frontend engineering, security, and devops interviews

If you're in 2B or below, you'll probably find this event helpful! Anyone is welcome to attend, however.

Code Party 0

| 6:00 PM EST | STC 0040

Our first code party of the term! Food is sandwiches, constitution amendments are a go, and Dr. Morton will be talking there! It'll be fun.

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The food is sandwiches, fruit platter, and coffee! You can consume this sustenance while:

  • Dr. Andrew Morton talks about an upcoming CS final year project course!
  • We take up Constitution and Code of Conduct amendments
  • We elect someone to the position of Secretary
  • Show off any cool things we're working on, and
  • Just, like, hang out for a while (that's what code parties are for)

Come out! There will be cool people there we promise. Like our VP Charlie Wang.

Winter 2018 Elections

| 5:00 PM EST | MC Comfy

The Computer Science Club will be holding elections for the Winter 2018 President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer. Additionally, the Systems Administrator, Office Manager and Librarian, CTF Club Liaison and IMAPd (fridge and snack runs) will be appointed.

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The Computer Science Club will be holding elections for the Winter 2018 term on Monday, January 15th at 5:00pm in the MC Comfy Lounge (MC 3001). There will be snacks at the elections, probably Timbits.

The following positions will be elected: President, Vice-President, Treasurer and Secretary. The following positions will be appointed: Systems Administrator (to be ratified at the meeting), Office Manager, Librarian and IMAPd (fridge and snack runs).

If you would like to run or nominate someone for any of the elected positions, you can put your/their name and Quest ID as well as a list of positions on a piece of paper into the nominations box in the CSC office (MC 3036/3037) or send an email to the Chief Returning Officer at cro@csclub.uwaterloo.ca.

I will periodically empty the nominations box and notify the people nominated via their @csclub.uwaterloo.ca (or failing that, @edu.uwaterloo.ca) email address. Please note that club officer positions (elected positions, plus Systems Administrator) are restricted to MathSoc social members.

Nominations will close at 5:00pm on Sunday, January 14th (24 hours prior to the start of elections). At this time, I will publish the list of nominations via the CSC mailing list as well as at https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/elections .

Voting will be done in a heads-down, hands-up manner and is restricted to MathSoc social members. A full description of the roles and the election procedure are listed in our Constitution, available at https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/about/constitution.

Any questions related to the election can be directed to cro@csclub.uwaterloo.ca.