Termcard for Hilary Term 2004

Novell

Monday 19th January, 20:30
Comlab

Matt Asay, Director of Novell's Linux Business Office and Open Source Review Board and responsible for laying the strategic foundation for Novell's use of open source software, is visiting us from Utah.

Novell hit the headlines when it bought Ximian (Gnome) and SuSE, and Matt will discuss how Novell now sees itself fitting into the open source community. Having once described himself as a "former Linux naysayer-turned-disciple", he is an acknowledged expert on the GNU General Public License (GPL) and he is willing to answer our questions.

This event is jointly organised with OxLUG.

Linux Device Creation

Sunday 1st February, 18:30
Comlab

Dick Morrell will talk on Linux Device Creation and also consolidation of Linux vendors and the muddled path ahead.

This talk is organised by OxLUG.

Film evening

Thursday 5th February, 20:00
Trinity

Join us in a night of videos! The current plan is "Cypher" followed by "Matrix Reloaded", although we welcome your opinions (to compsoc@ox.compsoc.net by Saturday 31 January please!).

Introduction to Eclipse

Tuesday 10th February, 20:30
Comlab

Doina Klinger and Joe Winchester will give an introduction to Eclipse, an open and extensible Integrated Development Environment that provides world class support for writing Java programs. A demo will show Eclipse in action with the best features such as source control, code assist, debug and refactoring. There will be a bit of background on how Eclipse was created and a presentation of the main concepts and the principles on which Eclipse is based.

Doina is the chair of the Eclipse Special Interest Group in Hursley and has done Eclipse development for the last two and a half years contributing plugins to various IBM products and writing a few papers on related Eclipse topics. Doina will be joined by her colleague, Joe Winchester. Joe is the editor of the Java on Desktop section of the Java Developer Journal and has extensive experience with Eclipse and tools.

AGM

Tuesday 17th February, 19:00
Trinity

At the annual general meeting, all aspects of the running of the society will be up for discussion, so come along and have your say. Furthermore, we'll be electing a new committee to lead the society into the next year. Afterwards, we'll wander off down Cowley Road for the traditional curry.

Cryptography

Thursday 19th February, 20:00
Trinity

Stephen White will talk about the history, and a bit about the theory, that has produced modern encryption technology. He will then explain how modern applications use it in practice, including a brief look at systems such as PGP, SSH and SSL.

Trip: Bletchley Park

Saturday 21st February, 10:00
Broad Street, outside Trinity

Bletchley Park was the site of the British World War II codebreaking effort and where the world's first programmable computer was constructed. We'll be taking a minibus to the site: entrance is 8 pounds for students, and we will be making a small additional charge for minibus hire.

If you'd like to come, please e-mail compsoc@compsoc.net as soon as possible — places are strictly limited.

Compuware

Tuesday 24th February, 20:30
Comlab

Sun Yuan from Compuware is coming to talk to us about the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The MDA is a new way of writing specifications and developing applications, based on a platform-independent model (PIM). A complete MDA specification consists of a definitive platform-independent base UML model, plus one or more platform-specific models (PSM) and interface definition sets, each describing how the base model is implemented on a different middleware platform. A complete MDA application consists of a definitive PIM, plus one or more PSMs and complete implementations, one on each platform that the application developer decides to support.

Project Hurricane

Thursday 26th February, 19:30
Comlab

Project Hurricane is a new student community portal and SDK designed by 3 MVS students in the UK to enable students to quickly and easily build online portals for student societies or communities of any type. Built on ASP.NET, Project Hurricane includes a whole host of interactive features such as blogging, forums as well as different skins to make it easy to customise your own portal.

Mark, one of the architects and developers on the Hurricane SDK, will be giving an overview of Hurricane, an intro to plug-in development and the future for Hurricane.

Oxford Computer Consultants

Tuesday 2nd March, 20:30
Comlab

This talk will focus on the practical side of web service development. It will start with a brief introduction to web services as they are now, together with a brief description of the missing pieces and how they are likely to be addressed. It will then go on to consider how the technology can make a useful difference, using the local government environment as an example, with a particular emphasis on how to get the technology off the ground. We'll also try to look at some reasons why turning theory into practice can be a hard thing to do.

Key signing

Wednesday 3rd March, 20:00
Lamb and Flag

A potential weakness of the public key architecture is that it can be difficult to establish that a given public key actually belongs to whom it claims. In signing a key, you guarantee that you have verified it to be bona fide. The Compsoc key signing party provides just such an opportunity to sign other's keys and thereby build a so-called 'web of trust'.

If you plan to come to the meeting, please send your public key to pgp@ox.compsoc.net not later than Wednesday 3rd March. Please note that it will be necessary to bring photographic ID and the details of your key with you. See this page for more details.

Game trainers and cheats

Tuesday 9th March, 20:00
Comlab

Have you ever wondered how cheats are found in games to be put on websites? Or how trainers are made? Our president will give an introduction to the world of game training, mainly focussing on Windows games, ranging from very basic to complex.

Ig Nobel

Thursday 11th March, 20:00
Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, Physics

The 2nd annual Ig Nobel Tour of the U.K. (for National Science Week) will occur during (approximately) March 12-21, with eight shows in eight cities. It will feature AIR editor Marc Abrahams, and many Ig Nobel Prize winners, and other of the world's great scientists, musicians, and other thinkers. Details to be announced.