UCC talks

Some previous talks are recorded online

Venue/Time

The Semester 2, 2010 talks will be presented in the Arts Fox Lecture Theatre at 1pm.

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Upcoming talks

3 September 2010: [DJA]: UCC programming competition 2010: Preliminaries!

• Where: Arts Fox LT, Crawley Campus

• When: 1:00pm

• Slides: TBD

• Synopsis: Daniel Axtens will cover the preliminaries for the 2010 UCC programming competition.

If you're interested in coming along - as a competitor, a spectator, or to provide background heckling of people writing hacky code that may just make the internet keep ticking, then you should come along.

24 September 2010: [MTL] NBN : The Nation Building Network that may never be built

• Where:

• When:

• Slides: TBD

• Synopsis: From the days of telegraph, the Postmaster General and to the future, the talk will cover both the technologies and politics involved with building national level communications infrastructure

• Facebook event:

• Presenter: Mark Tearle is a graduate and employee of The University of Western Australia. During daylight hours he manages the physical communications infrastructure of the University.

Semester 2, 2010 Timetable

Tentative Proposals

• [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] - Basic Operating Systems - A Practical View
• [SLX] - Compression: Lossless, Lossy (Image, Audio and Video)
• [CJS] - Security and architectures of current game console hardware
• [CJS] - 3D reconstruction from photos, pending the Cameron Hall 3D project
• [MTL] - physical layer comms / fibre / copper / NBN / snack machine codebase
• [ECF] - will be in Perth for the 5th of November and might be persuaded to do a talk on Optimisation for Game Coders. If work doesn't get too insane. Work got insane. Sorry. Maybe next trip.

Past Talks

20 August 2010: [AHC] Software engineering in C: Why "Object Oriented Programming" is a Design Choice, not a Language Choice

• Where: Arts FOX LT

• When: 1pm for 1:05pm start

• Slides: TBD

• Synopsis: C is taught today as a low level and embedded software language, unsuitable for large scale modern application design. Current education focuses on "object oriented" languages such as C++, Java, C# and some of the "OO" interpreted languages (Python, Ruby) and "Meta-OO" languages (Lua, Perl). Adrian seeks to dispel this myth somewhat, through an exploration of the history of programming languages and software design methodologies from the dawn of modern computer programming to today. He will show how some object orientation and modern software design methods are useful in C and give a brief introduction into the C language as a whole. He will also show how some of the older, structured programming design methods are still be useful in modern software design.

• Facebook event: [http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/event.php?eid=106534882737957&ref=mf]

• Presenter: Adrian Chadd is a long-time open source contributor and has been active in both software and networking communities since 1995. His current work ranges from contributing to open source proxy/cache software, FreeBSD/MIPS embedded kernel development, Atheros 802.11bg wireless driver development, FUSE filesystem work and a variety of high-performance network gateway applications. His focus on kernel and high-performance solutions has kept him firmly planted in the C world for the past 10 years and he has become increasingly interested in finding ways to improve the C application and testing lifecycle. Adrian runs a small company, Xenion Pty Ltd, providing hosting, internet and consulting services to a variety of local and international clients. He is currently studying towards a Bachelor Arts at UWA, majoring in Psychology and Linguistics.

30 April 2010: [TPG] CPU emulators

• Where: Cameron Hall Loft, UWA Campus

• When: 6pm for a 6:15pm start

• Slides: [http://www.ucc.asn.au/~adrian/talks/UCC-30-05-2010-TPG-Emulators.pdf]

• 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.

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.

• Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=120554834638116&index=1

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.

14-May-2010: Adrian Chadd [AHC]: Interfacing Old Hardware to New Hardware

• Title: Interfacing old hardware to new hardware

• Where: Cameron Hall Loft, UWA Campus

• When: 6pm for a 6:15pm start

• Synopsis: There has been a surge of interest in recent years for interfacing older hardware (8/16 bit computers, sound/video hardware, IO controllers, etc) to the cheaply available embedded (and not so embedded) computer technology available today. This talk will cover some digital electronics basics, information about the design and operation of older 8 and 16 bit computers, followed by some software/hardware interface examples. Adrian will (hopefully!) finish up with an example of one of his older projects - a single SID6581 MIDI synth.

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.

• Recording: http://www.ucc.asn.au/UCCTalks/2010/3-AHC-OldHardware.ogg - Recorded by [TPG]

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.

Abstract also available here: http://ciser.cornell.edu/IASSIST/program/a4.shtm

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.

3 August 2010: Ben Last - NearMap

• Where: General Purpose Bldg 2 Lecture Theatre, UWA Campus

• When: 12.50pm for a 1pm start

• Synopsis: Ben Last, development manager from NearMap will be talking about some of the technical challenges associated with developing and serving up a web application that some have argued could be the next Google Maps competitor.

Pizza will be served at ~1.40pm for those who have attended Ben's talk.