• Where: CIS215 (School of Computing and Information Systems Building, between LAW and the Gyms)
• When: 6:00 PM
• How Much: $20 per table of 6 (or $5 per head if less)

Light refreshments will be included in the cost of the evening.

To register, send an e-mail to the TUCS executive including your team name, and the names of the people on your table. You can make payment on the night.

Tables

• None yet

The podcast is currently available in the convenient formats of .FLV and whatever the presenter chose at the time (generally quicktime).

Formats

• Standard RSS (anything but iTunes)
• iTunes

People who give presentations will be eligible for bonus TUCS POINTS SCHEME Points, and it’s entirely possible that there will be prizes awarded for good talks!

What are Lightning Talks?

Lightning talks are a common feature of computing/IT-related conferences: attendees volunteer to give a short talk, at short notice. These talks are given in lightning talk sessions, which can be topic restricted (e.g. a “Python” lightning talks session), or can be general. At linux.conf.au, the general lightning talks session concludes the conference, held in the keynote venue, presented in front of all (~800) delegates.

TUCS is ran its first Lightning Talks session in 2008, as a way of concluding our first series of Tech Talks.

If you want to get a feel for what a Lightning Talks session is like, LCA2008’s was most excellent, and can be downloaded from this link (on AARNet, so should be super-quick from on campus). Unfortunately, TUCS’ 2008 Lightning Talks were not recorded, so you can’t sample them here.

Registration/More Info

Registrations for talks open today, so if you’re interested in finding out more information, or would like to sign up for a talk, find Chris Neugebauer in the Mac Lab (room 376, Centenary Building), or send an e-mail to tucs-exec@tucs.org.au.

Current Line-up

Here’s a list of people who’ve signed up for talks so far (note please that this isn’t the final order for presentations on the day — see rule 7 for details.):

1. Paris Buttfield-Addison: The Power of Fist. Thank you. That is all.
2. Alex Berry: An Alternative to IPv6
3. Michael Ford: Thrust
4. Thomas Karpiniec: “What time is it, Eccles?” An Introduction to Network Time Protocol
5. Josh Deprez: Abusing the Banach-Tarski Paradox for Fun and Profit
6. Chris Neugebauer: Cocomo: An Accessible Mac API for Maclabbers.
7. Andrew Bennett: The Grand Wizard
8. Nic Wittison: The Internet: A brief History of Meme.
9. Simon Arneaud: Magical Girl Anime as a Means of Self-induced Brain Damage
10. Matthew D’Orazio: Why computers don’t work.
11. Tim Nugent: Warbl Whizzle and other as-yet unconfirmed things.
12. John Haight: ACS Spiel
13. Jon Manning: Unity
14. Peter Lyle: OpenTTD Signals

Rules of the event

In these rules, “The Talks Organiser” is Chris Neugebauer.

1. Talks will last three minutes at maximum. This will be strictly enforced (possibly via manual intervention!)
2. Talks must be registered (with a topic) with the Talks organiser, before the talks session begins — preferably before 12:30PM, May 29, if you want to use slides.
3. There will be time for at most 15 talks, the first registered talks will be the ones presented.
4. Slides may be used: They must be in PDF format (no exceptions!) with no scripts or embedded active components (e.g. motion video or audio), and e-mailed to (and viewable by) the organiser by 12:30PM, Friday 29 May.
5. There is no rule 5.
6. Talk topics and content should be suitable for a general audience: in particular, content of violent or pornographic nature will not be tolerated. If you’re not sure, ask.
7. The order of talks will not be those listed above: a random order of talks will be selected on the day.
8. Only one talk on any given topic will be accepted.
9. Only one talk by any given person will be accepted.

• Sat. 21st March
• Sat. 25th April
• Post-exams (TBA)

LANs are, for the time being, in the usual place at the usual time.

See the LAN information page for more information.

Edit 4/3: Note that the day of the March LAN has been moved forward a week to the 21st to avoid conflict with Dark Media LAN

Our server of many years had a haemorrhage and had to be put down. It has been replaced with a beastly new server made of redundancy and win. Backups have been tediously restored to the new server.

We apologise for the down time and don’t anticipate anything of this nature happening again for the next few years, touch wood.

• President: Chris Neugebauer
• Vice-President: Paris Buttfield-Addison
• Treasurer: Michael Ford
• Secretary: Jon Manning
• General Representatives: Nic Wittison, Luke Hovington

Two more general representative positions will be offered for election, along with up to two staff representatives, at a special general meeting, early in 2009.

Thanks to those that were elected for volunteering and here’s to a
bigger, better 2009 than our successful 2008.

Talk Details:

• Speaker: Christopher Neugebauer
• Skill Level: Any, Python knowledge desirable but not necessary

In October 2008, two new releases of Python will be unleashed on a mostly-suspecting public: Python 2.6, a continuation of the current Python series, and 3.0 (also known as Python3000), the release in which the Python Developers break your code, confuse your development processes, cause global chaos, destruction, and other exaggerated, not-generally-nice things.

In this talk, I’ll quickly cover some advanced Python techniques in the hope of making the rest of the talk more bearable; I’ll then discuss new additions to Python appearing in 2.6 and 3.0, the backwards-incompatible changes introduced in 3.0, and overview of the process of porting code from Python 2.6 to 3.x. The talk will be aimed at people who don’t necessarily have experience in Python, with a focus on learning Python in a world with parallel releases.