Newsletter for 29 November 2006

Wed 29 Nov 2006 Newsletter

Newsletter

Contents

Programming Competition

This year’s programming competition has been launched and full details are available from http://progcomp.uwcs.co.uk/. This year participants are invited to write an AI which controls five robot tanks with the aim of obliterating the opposing team. The deadline for entering is the second week of term 2, so you have the entire Christmas holiday to have a go, and with cash prizes (last year we had a 500GBP fund) there is little reason not to submit an attempt.

Resignation

For a number of reasons (including avoiding failing my degree), I have had to resign from my post as secretary of The Computing Society. As there has not been an Exec meeting since I informed the rest of the exec of my decision to resign, no decision has been made as to who, or indeed how someone, will be elected to take over. If you think you might be interested in the position watch this space for further details, or email exec at warwickcompsoc.co.uk.

Social Events

Due to lack of interest, we have had to cancel this year’s Christmas meal. There are still plenty of social events planned including the Pub Crawl, starting at 7pm in the City Arms in Earlsdon on Thursday 30th November, and Bowling, starting at 3pm in Leamington on Wednesday 6th December.

Academic Events

Unfortunately IBM have been unable to reschedule the talk on Virtualisation for this term and so it has been cancelled. We are hopeful that it will happen next term. The LUG and BUGFLUG (see “Linux User group” below) meetings are continuing to occur regularly and this week’s LUG meeting features a tutorial on using LaTeX, which is likely to be useful to anyone needing to write maths essays or prepare reports for coursework, lab work or third year projects.

Also on the academic front, the results from the 48 hour game coding event, as judged by FreeStyleGames, have been sent to us by the Games Design Society and they are:

1. Powerstation

2. Neutro

3. Mutation

4. Atomz

5. Ponies/Dirty Bomb

All entries are available at http://warwickgamedesign.co.uk/projects/48hcompetition/.

UWCS Calender

Just a quick reminder that we have our own iCalender feed at calender.uwcs.co.uk which many calender applications can subscribe to in order to receive dates and time of upcoming CompSoc events.

Gaming Sessions

We are still working hard on re-establishing regular gaming sessions and hope to have some news soon.

Linux User Group

Linux User Group meeting, as always, is on Wednesdays, so head along to the Learning Grid for 7pm. If you have any trouble using/installing/fixing Linux on your machine there are plenty of people willing to help. There is also the BUGFLUG (see http://wuglug.org.uk/BUGFLUG for more details), again in the Learning Grid, on Mondays between 12 noon and 2pm.

Exec Meetings

All members are reminded that exec meetings are open and all are welcome to attend. Exec meetings are held at 7:30pm every Friday in meeting room 6 in the students union.

Internet Relay Chat

You can talk to most regular CompSoc members, and all of the exec via CompSoc’s IRC server. The connection settings are:

A windows IRC client is available from: http://www.silverex.org/download/

Cable / Web Hosting

Compsoc provides many services to it’s members including the sale of Ethernet RJ45 cable, and a shell account and webspace on a Compsoc server.

Base charge for a cable is 1GBP plus 30p per metre. So,

The shell account on our server Molotov is free, and comes with 50MB of storage and is accessible from the url: http://.uwcs.co.uk . Extra quota is only 2.50GBP for an extra 500MB, far cheaper than any hosting provider you’re likely to find. The server is on campus so uploading to it from campus machines will be at LAN speeds. More information about our Web Hosting here: http://www.uwcs.co.uk/services/hosting/member