Newsletter for 6 February 2005

Sun 06 Feb Newsletter

Newsletter 2005/02/06

The management apologises for the lateness of this newsletter, but the first version of it was eaten by Thunderbird about 1 paragraph from completion. Si1entDave was a little miffed to say the least.

This week for your enjoyment:

The CompSoc AGM
The Programming Competition
Forthcoming LUG events
The New CompSoc Website
The Mysterious Missing Newsletter

1. The CompSoc AGM

The CompSoc AGM is upon us once again, and the details are as follows:

Date: 11th February 2005
Time: 7pm - 9pm, although we shall probably finish earlier.
Location: Meeting Room 3 in Union North
Open to: All, although only members can vote

The Exec would like everyone to come to the AGM, as it is your best opportunity to have a say in the direction taken by the Society, and contribute to its organisation. The following members have volunteered to stand for election so far:

President - Sadiq Jaffer
Treasurer - Ian Norris
Secretary - Adam Miles
Technical Officer - Chris Boyle, Phil Stoneman
Social Secretary - Chloe Dives
Gaming Officer - Laurence Hurst, Richard Thompson, Paul Broadbridge
LUG Liaison - Nominated by the LUG, not voted for at the AGM

(updated by Chris Boyle 2005-02-08)

In addition to the elections, the AGM will also have a roundup of what has been done by the Society this year, and a summary of future plans. We really do recommend that you members attend, as anyone who has any sort of opinions on CompSoc and its plans will have a chance to put their opinion forward.

2. The Programming Competition

The programming competition is now complete, and the winners have been announced, and the winners are as follows:

Bryan Gale - &£250
John Fearnley - &£125
Matthew Brophy - &£75

An honorable mention also goes to Adam Miles, who received a copy of Sun’s book “Core Java 2 Vol 1 Fundamentals” for his entry. The Exec would like to thank Andrew Sully and his team for all their hard work on making this event a success. Thanks also go to Accenture, who donated the prize fund. Next year’s competition is already in the early planning stages, so if you’d like to help us run the next ProgComp, please do get in touch. The easiest way would be to come and see us at the AGM, and ask us about it in person.

3. Forthcoming UWLUG Events

The Linux User Group are continuing their series of interesting and informative mini-tutorials on Wednesday evenings. This week they’re doing a summary of PPTP, the VPN protocol. It will cover enough to enable you to connect to the campus wireless hotspots without logging into bluesocket, which ITS allow you to do if you are using their VPN. The meetings are usually in Meeting Room 6, and whilst the tutorial itself starts at 8pm, there will be the normal general organisation meeting at 7, with pre- and post-event socialising at 7.30 and 9pm until late. All are welcome to turn up, including non-members, and any and all questions will be answered, on PPTP or otherwise. Also, if you enjoy that, why not come to the CompSoc AGM, on Friday at 7 in MR3?

4. The CompSoc Website DevTeam

Peter Ellis (PlanarPlatypus) is putting together the development team for the new CompSoc website. This will be based around Zope, a content management system written in Python. Whilst knowing Python will mean you can help with writing back-end code, it is not a necessity as we will need people to write the content as well, which will require no prior knowledge whatsoever. Python is a very easy language to pick up however, and this could be an ideal opportunity to learn one of the fastest-growing scripting languages around. If you’re interested in playing any sort of part in the project, be it back-end coding, site design, or content creation, pop into #website on irc.uwcs.co.uk, or email techteam@uwcs.co.uk and make yourself known. Alternatively, you could come and say hello to Peter or one of the other TechTeam members at the AGM.

The more astute of you will have noticed that this newsletter is for Week 6, whilst the previous one was for Week 4. Whatever happened to Week 5 I hear you cry? It is lost to the mists of time and the Internet. Also, it was decided that since most of the content of newsletters is about forthcoming events, it made more sense to refer to newsletters by the week they are mostly about, rather than the week that has been and gone. Most likely there will never be a newsletter for Week 5. Although on the other hand, if you’re very good, I might just hand it out in hard copy at the AGM, so you’ll just have to come to the AGM to find out.

6. The CompSoc AGM

By the way, did we mention you should come to the AGM?
h5.

This newsletter was written by Si1entDave, and brought to you today by
contributions from the Exec, strong black coffee, and the number 42.