UCC talks - tentative

A fixed venue/time is yet to be decided - either Friday evening @ Cameron Hall Loft, or Friday 1pm in a seminar room on campus.

30 April 2010: [TPG] CPU emulators

• Where: Cameron Hall Loft, UWA Campus

• When: 6pm for a 6:15pm start

• Synopsis: Putting it simply, emulation makes one computer look like another. This can be as simple as changing a couple of settings on the host, to porting an entire API (like Wine does) to emulating the complete hardware. The purpose of this talk is to teach the basics of emulation, mostly focusing on hardware level.

Please be at the loft at 6pm if you'd like to order pizza - pizza will be organised to (hopefully!) arrive as the talk finishes.

Upcoming talks

07-May-2010: Andrew Williams/Dave Emrich [DAV]/Mark Glossop: Square Kilometre Array

• Title: Dust, Frogs, and Radio Astronomy - what's going on now at the proposed 'Square Kilometre Array' site in the Murchison region

• Where: Cameron Hall Loft, UWA Campus

• When: 6pm for a 6:15pm start

• Synopsis: Southern Africa and Australia are still competing to host the proposed 'Square Kilometre Array' (SKA), a radio telescope that will be more powerful than every other radio telescope in the world combined. The site decision won't be made until 2012, but smaller telescopes are being built at both of the proposed sites already. Andrew has been working on one of them - the 'Murchison Widefield Array' (MWA) telescope project - since 2007, David Emrich [DAV] is the commissioning engineer for the MWA, and Mark Glossop is working on software and system/network admin. Andrew's got a slideshow of pretty pictures and diagrams, and all three of us old-guard UCCans will talk about the MWA, other radio telescopes being built at the Australian site, and what it's actually like to work at the Australian SKA site.

Please be at the loft at 6pm if you'd like to order pizza - pizza will be organised to (hopefully!) arrive as the talk finishes.

21-May-2010: Samuel Spencer [CHZ]: Metadata as a driving force in survey methodology

• Title: Metadata as a driving force in survey methodology

• Where: Cameron Hall Loft, UWA Campus

• When: 6pm for a 6:15pm start

• Synopsis: This includes a brief introduction into some of the work the Australian Bureau of Statistics is doing with XML metadata/data formats, followed by a practice run of the talk I will be presenting at IASSIST in New York(Abstract below), including a demonstration of one of the open-source research projects the ABS has been developing.

• Abstract: DDI offers users numerous ways to use and capture data and metadata. With the shift towards a statistical lifecycle approach in DDI 3, we must look at how these two facets can work together to drive capture and processing of events downstream of the lifecycle. In this presentation there we will be a discussion of how the metadata captured in DDI 3 can be used and transformed to assist other processes within the lifecycle. Finally, this will be demonstrated using a DDI Instance of the Internet Access Survey from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing how an XSLT transform can convert DDI 3.1 metadata in XForms for internet data capture.

Please be at the loft at 6pm if you'd like to order pizza - pizza will be organised to (hopefully!) arrive as the talk finishes.

Others

• 14-May-2010: [AHC] - interfacing old hardware to new microcontrollers
• [DJA] - UCC programming competition discussion/overview
  • In Semester 2, UCC is (hopefully!) running a programming competition catering for everyone from beginners to experts. This talk will cover the rules, how to enter, and what to expect, as well as the odd hint or two about how not to fail completely.
  • I could also possibly give a follow-up "how [not] to run a programming competition" technical talk - both about the technical side and the logistical side of how things work/worked/didn't work.
• Zanchey - multi-user system security
• Zanchey - how to give a talk/presentation
• [AHC] - can do a talk or two on theoretical/practical networking basics if people are at all interested
• [AHC] - writing clean, well structured C, and why you don't necessarily need an OO language

• [TPG] - tenative on outcome of 30th Apr Basic Operating Systems - A Practical Approach