h3. CompSoc Minutes

Present

• Richard Wilson
• David Buckley
• Pete Ellis
• Phil Stoneman
• Euan MacGregor
• Christian Bates
• Chris Boyle
• Paul Broadbridge
• Sadiq Jaffer

Newsletter

Newsletter to be sent to members on Monday. Content to be sent to David by Sunday afternoon.

LAN

Room has been booked, Phil will contact Piazza tomorrow about network socket. Newsletter to mention having an up-to-date virus scanner, LUG installfest. Speaker placement will be adjusted to have speakers on each table. Possible alternative locations for holding LANs discussed were the Westwood Games Hall and Ramphal Building. Phil will talk to room bookings about large rooms and Richard will talk to the electricians about power. This LAN has three reserve signups, one of which is Richard (as he was recovering from a 48h stint when fixing the server) and an ex-member Duncan who would have been able to sign up properly if his account had been reactivated in time. We’ll be allowing them to attend, although space will be at a premium.

LUG Installfest

There has yet to be any publicity about this. It’ll be mentioned this week in a CS120 lecture. B213 has a stage at the front which will be used for the installfest.

Servers

Not much news from DCS about the cupboard, should be ready in a few weeks though. Phil went to a meeting with Steve Pretty and the building manager about a cupboard in the Union, they want us to pay for the installation of a network socket. We’ll start orderring hardware soon, to give the server time to be tested before installation. This is to be discussed in further detail at a later date (8pm tomorrow). Molotov has recently been unstable due to a sudden shortage of memory which has yet to be fully investigated. Current thinking is that the imap server.

Academic

The Perl lectures concluded this week gone, and the LUG also held a guest lecture by Jason Clifford. There’ll be another LUG guest lecture this forthcoming week by Dave Jones. Phil believes that we need to organise more academic events, e.g. a guest lecture once a week. This will promote awareness of the society, and would make CompSoc more attractive to sponsors.
In order to prevent the exec meetings dragging on, Phil proposes forming an academic team to meet specifically to organise such events with the academic officer reporting back to the exec. Current academic officer, Pete, has come up with a provisional members list for this team: Sadiq, Johnathan Smith (LucidIon), Richard Oakham (Zatneichat’el), Chris Boyle and himself, although it was agreed that it would be good if we could get some first years involved with this. The team will meet initially sometime early next week. Another project for the academic team would be to revive the programming competition.
It was also proposed to drop the membership fee in order to encourage more members joining, with charges for e.g. attending LANs and shell accounts/web hosting. This will raise more funds than just the membership fee. Phil will discuss this with Steve Pretty at a later date.
Provided it’s advertised well (e.g. pigeon hole spamming, mailing head of departments, DCS projector), we should be able to fill L3 for the Kevin Warwick guest lecture next term, to be discussed further at an academic meeting.

Tech team

As discussed last week, we’re forming a tech team to manage the servers. Richard would like to attract less “hardcore geek” type people.

Networking

We might be able to get some 16 or 24 port managed 10/100Mbit switches from ITS. Managed switches have numerous advantages, such as being able to enable someone’s port(s) at LANs after we’ve confirmed they’re virus free and we can create VLANs to keep different types of traffic separate (e.g. heavy file transfers, games)

Socials

Paul will be organising the meal and karting; He’ll report back next week. For the Bletchley Park trip, Phil is taking the minibus test in the middle of week five. Ticket price will be about 10 pounds a head and there might be the possibility of booking a coach trip, although that might be just bad wording on the website. Provisionally, the event is to be held on Wednesday of week 9. Lord of the Rings days this Sunday from 11am at Phil’s, which will involve watching the two extended versions before going to the Skydome to see the final film.

Website

Webmaster’s private instance of apache2/mod_perl2 etc. is active and the site is mostly now mod_perl clean. The wiki was suggested to be used as a place to discuss events. The details of this and other website design tweaks to be discussed at the tech team.

AGM

To be held on the Saturday on the end of week six, in meeting rooms five and six at 8pm. Proxy voting shouldn’t be much of an issue, as the only external member who is officially allowed to vote is James Ross.

Budget

This to be discussed tomorrow at 8pm.

Any other Business

David’s efforts with the game server info page were recognised. Sadiq announced he won’t be standing for any exec positions.

h3. Compsoc Minutes

Present

• Richard Wilson
• Chris Boyle
• Christian Bates
• Sophie Marshall
• Phil Stoneman
• Euan MacGregor
• David Buckley
• Paul Broadbridge
• Sadiq Jaffer
• Pete Ellis

Website

Photos have been moved. The terms of society hosting were discussed: we provide DNS, mail, 20Mb of webspace (additional space can be purchased at the usual rate of 2.50 per 100Mb) and require that they purchase any domain they want to use and that the webmaster be a member of CompSoc.

LAN

Room still booked, Phil will contact piazza tomorrow and signups will open tomorrow evening.

Budget

We’ve spent 70 pounds on software/games.

DCS Cupboard / Servers

Internal dimensions: 34” wide, 16” deep, 66” high. Sadiq thinks we can exchange server hosting space with RaW, and Phil has spoken to filmsoc about a mutual backup scheme. Phil has spare cases in his house which can be put to good use. Pete might be providing us with an XP1800+ and a Sotek motherboard for the members server. The core server (molotov) will keep the Duron 950. The webmaster requested having a separate instance of Perl and apache with the main apache proxying requests to the separate one. MySQL 4 will become the main SQL server at 8pm on Saturday of Week 8 and MySQL 3 will be shutdown at the end of the term.

Academic

The LUG are holding talks in week four and week five in L4. Bletchly park trip to be held towards the end of the term. Swing tutorial might be held during week four, but Phil is currently busy. Other ideas for tutorials include HTML, C, PC modding.

Socials

Paul recommends an “all you can eat” Chinese meal in Leamington for the Compsoc Meal (possibly in week five). Karting will cost at most 35 pounds a head (possibly Wednesday of week seven).

Elections

We’ve had a number of people standing for positions already. The AGM will be held in Week 6 an hour before gaming (8pm) with nominations closing a few days in advance. David Buckley has offered his services as “communications officer” to mail the society every week. It is suggested that the next administration create a “tech team” to have jobs delegated to them to alleviate the load on the tech officer. The tech team is to be appointed by the tech officer, who is ultimately responsible for the actions of the team as a whole.

h3. Compsoc Minutes

Present

• Peter Ellis
• Richard Wilson
• Phil Stoneman
• Sophie Marshall
• Chris Boyle
• David Buckley
• Euan MacGregor
• Sadiq Jaffer
• Paul Broadbridge
• Christian Bates

Exec

Paul Broadbridge and Peter Ellis have been co-opted into the exec to occupy the newly created positions of Social Secretary and Academic Officer respectively.

LAN

The next LAN will be held in the B218/9 rooms like before at the end of week four. We also have booked the subsequent LAN in LIB1 for the end of week eight. Phil will remind himself to bug Piazza prior to the LAN to get a net connection. Attendees will be reminded prior to the event to ensure their systems are virus free and have a working firewall.

LOTR

It has been suggested to hold a LOTR day, which would involve watching the first two on DVD at Phil’s house and then going to the cinema to see the final film on the Sunday at the end of week three.

Bletchley Park

Normally those taking the History of Computing module take a trip to this, but not this year. We feel it would be a good idea to organise such a trip ourselves. Phil is taking the minibus test on week four. Given the potential number of attendees (120 are taking the History of Computing course), we might be able to book a coach.

Kevin Warwick

This will be held on the second day of the second term. This needs to be plugged fairly heavily on the first day.

LUG

The LUG will be holding talks on the 21st and the 28th of January by Jason Clifford and Dave Jones respectively. Another project still being discussed by the LUG was to use the new DCS lab to hold a workshop on fixing broken User Mode Linux hosts. There will be another Desktop tutorial.

Tutorials

Swing has been done before and would be useful for those doing ISE. A CVS tutorial would also be useful, but there isn’t enough material to do an hour long tutorial: there are various tutorials on the web which we could either directly link or condense/rewrite to be more appropriate for the target audience.

Cupboard

We are now very close to having a cupboard in DCS, thanks to Rodger Packwood. We should be getting the internal dimensions of the cupboard on Monday so we can start ordering equipment.

Socials

Alternatives to the City Arms were discussed. The “Surfers” bar on the Westwood campus was mooted as it’s closer and normally empty. Other possible socials discussed were paintball course in London that is based on a CounterStrike map. There’ll be a CompSoc meal at the end of week five.

Elections

There’ll be an AGM held at the end of week six for the elections. From the current exec, Christian Bates and Richard Wilson have stated their intention of standing for president.

Finances

Payment of £2.50 was received from the Anime society for webspace.