We’d like to extend a warm welcome both to previous, and prospective new members, to the new academic year.
Over the summer, we’ve been working to extend the range of services that we offer to our members. We now have a range of gaming servers operating from on campus, and also have plans laid for some great activities over the course of the next year. These include forthcoming trips to IBM, interesting talks from people in the technology industry and of course a number of our fantastic LAN parties.

If you want to keep abreast of what we’re offering, it’s strongly recommended you keep an eye on the Events section of this site, which also has a handy RSS feed.
To become involved in the society, the best way is to pop into our IRC chat room and get to know us!

Finally, if you’ve just joined the University this year, come and see us at the society’s fair, where we’ll be on both Wednesday and Thursday! We’ll have cookies, or… something.

We’re happy to say that today we opened a number of game servers for a number of source based games. These are:
Counter-Strike: Source – 137.205.210.236:27015
Team Fortress 2 – 137.205.210.236:27011
Left 4 Dead – 137.205.210.236:27010

These are in addition to existing Warsow and DoTA servers which are also being hosted on campus. Furthermore, we have a Mumble (free voice communication software) server running at mumble.uwcs.co.uk:19000.

If you’re interested in playing any games with us, but particularly Valve Source based games, please feel free to join our Steam group.

Owing in part to the extended server downtime over the weekend, we’d like to point out that we now have a presence on both Twitter and Identi.ca where you can keep abreast of society news and information. There is also a Facebook page, should you prefer to follow the society in this way.

Thanks to favourable power situation in Lib2 we decided to extend signups by 10 spaces to a total of 70. Therefore if you missed your signup now is your chance.

Please note: The 5th table in the seating plan is imaginary, please do not use it.

Guest signups for BFL at the end of term 3 are open as of now. This is due to problems with SU authentication which were out of our hands. Standard members are advised to signup as soon as possible in order to get a place.

BFL signups for the LAN in week 10 (22–26 June) are now open to all members. Guest signups are due to open on June 3 in order that priority be given to our members.
Further details on the BFL can be found here: http://uwcs.co.uk/events/details/1007/

Good afternoon!

This is just a final note before tomorrow’s trip to watch Star Trek tomorrow to confirm some final details. Hopefully, you’ve all bought your tickets by now (though there are still some available, according to their website). If you elected to collect your ticket from the box office, it might be advisable to make a note of the reference number before leaving tomorrow.
As there is no allocated seating, if we wish to sit together we will probably need to arrive quite early, and as such we’re meeting at the IMAX at 1300. If travelling from Coventry or Campus, I’d recommend the 1214 train from Canley train station, which should get you to Birmingham New Street by 1245ish, allowing for the 15minute walk to Millenium point (just don’t get lost!). If you arrive later than this and can’t find us, feel free to contact me by mobile.

Hope to see you all tomorrow, if not in Varsity in about… four minutes.
Nathan

As you should be able to see, today we have rolled out a new website. We hope that you like it, and find it easier to use. However, please note the following:

Bugs

Despite best testing efforts, things will be broken and/or have some bugs in them somewhere. If you think this might be the case, you should join the website irc channel, and point out what you think is wrong. If this is confirmed then you should file a ticket. It is highly possible that something may break as a result of the website rollout, or migration of data from the old website. If you think that the data is incorrect, for example duplicate location entries for the same room, then you should point that out to an exec member.

Guest Accounts

If had a guest account on the old website then your guest account will have been removed (some seemed old and had incorrect information in). If you require a guest account for some future event, you should ask an exec member to create one for you.

Service Information

The information for the current quota, database and shell account values is based on that in the database on the old website. It has been recollected to some extent in order to attempt to correct it, however, due to the size of this information it is possible that it is incorrect. When you login you should look at whether you have a shell account, database account and what quota level you have and if it is incorrect, you should report it to an exec member.

Layout/Ongoing improvements

There is a trac (issue tracking) instance for the new website, at http://trac.uwcs.co.uk/reinhardt. For any new feature requests or suggested improvements, you should submit a ticket here. Please look to ensure that there isn’t a ticket already outstanding that covers your issue. In the medium term you should submit any bugs to this trac, we are currently only requesting bugs on irc, in expectation of issues being found immediately after deployment.

Tickets

In order to help with exec organisation there is a list of tickets in order to assign jobs to people. This can be used to raise issues formally and so the secretary and presidents can keep track of what the exec are doing. You can also use it in order to see what issues are currently outstanding, and what issues the exec, and individual members, have to do.

The exec would like to thank Mulletron, Odd_Bloke especially, and all other contributors to the project, for putting so much hard-work into getting the site where it is now.

Hi everyone,

Hope you’re all having a cracking Easter! Not too much going on events wise, but those cracking guys in the techteam have been hard at work planning for something quite big. In light of recent events with regard to the rise of the Conficker worm, we have decided to migrate our servers to Windows Server 2008. It was a tough decision but we couldn’t leave the security of our servers at risk any longer. Patches which fix the vulnerability for Microsoft’s Windows operating system have existed since November 2008, but we are yet to see a similar patch for any Linux distribution.

While we still like and encourage the idea of Free and Open Source Software (often known as FOSS), we do not feel that such software, often just written in people’s spare time, can compare to the professionally made software on offer from Microsoft. Perhaps in a few years time when companies have a greater hand in directing open source development things will be brighter, but for now the decision is made.

Steps have been taken to ensure compatibility with the new software, and the website has undergone a rewrite using ASP.NET with a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 backend.

We appreciate your patience during this transition, and any downtime which it may entail.

Happy Hols!
Techteam

(Hope you all had a fun April Fools’ Day)

Once again we hit that time of term when a weekend can be wholly devoted to the honest, clean and outdoors fun of a good LAN party. For those of you who haven’t been before (or in a little while), you might want to read the what to do [0] and bring [1] guides on the website, an indispensable tool for all potential attendees. I would also like to draw your attention to the Pizza Order [2] on the website, which we’ll be making from Dominos and should arrive 9 or 10PM on Friday. At 50% off, there surely can’t be any drawbacks to having at least two large pizzas to yourself.

Wishing you all a good L4D/Empire LAN,
Estel
Gaming Officer

[0] – http://uwcs.co.uk/gaming/lans/whattodo
[1] – http://uwcs.co.uk/gaming/lans/whattobring
[2] – http://uwcs.co.uk/society/events/details/1045