March 2010 - Announce-RedBrick - lists.redbrick.dcu.ie

Quiz || Coding Contest || Geek Meets || Admins: Reinstalling Carbon
by Emma G 29 Mar '10

29 Mar '10

Hey Redbrickers, Welcome to week 8. Here's what's happening this week == Quiz == This Tuesday, the 30th of March, we're having our annual Table quiz in the Oldbar. The raffle prize is a Dell Mini netbook and prizes for the winning teams include portable hard drives. There will also be 2nd and 3rd prizes and also spot prizes on the night some include a free pint. Entry is €12 per team and it's in teams of 4. It will be legendary! Be there :) == Coding Contest == Just a reminder that entries for the coding contest is due today. Entries up till midnight will be accepted. Any entries submitted after this time will not be accepted. So if you haven't done already email: committee(a)redbrick.dcu.ie with you're entry now before it's too late. Just a reminder about the prizes: For the easy contest the winner will get an external hard drive. For the advanced one the winner get a 22 inch LG HD monitor. In both contests 2nd prize is an 8gb usb stick and 3rd prize is free redbrick membership for next year. == Geek Meets == We'll continue our lil meet ups this Thursday, 1st Of April, at 6.30pm in LG26. again it's basically we're just gonna meet up, start up projects together and chat about techy stuff. Again there may be a few sweets and drinks thrown in too. So come along :D === Admins: Reinstalling Carbon === In order to facilitate Carbon's use by members as a development box it will be reinstalled with Ubuntu Lucid on Monday, this will enable us to provide members with more up to date software while still using the Ubuntu packaging repos. Going forward we hope to keep carbon up to date inline with ubuntu's 6 month release cycle. This work will cause several hours of downtime on Monday. That's all for now. Hope everyone isn's too stressed out with projects and exams coming up. Here's a random video that I love at the moment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlnUCmLmWck (possibly NSFW) Enjoy, Emma :) -- Redbrick - Secretary 2009/2010 If practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, why practice? Save the Earth. It's the only planet with Chocolate :)

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Geek Meet Up Tonight at 6 in LG26
by Eoghan Cotter 25 Mar '10

25 Mar '10

Hi all, The Geek Meet in this weeks announce will take place tonight at 6pm in LG26. This is an opportunity for people to meet up, bounce idea's off one another, work on the coding contest etc, From the announce: == Geek meets == This Thursday, 25th March, we're gonna have our first geek meet up. Basically we're just gonna meet up, start up projects together and chat about techy stuff. There may be a few sweets and drinks thrown in too. So shall be fun :) Cheers Eoghan -- Eoghan Cotter DCU Networking Society (Redbrick) Sys Admin

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Admin training || Geek meets || Coding contest || Quiz
by Emma G 21 Mar '10

21 Mar '10

Welcome to week 7, So here's what's happening this week. == Admin training == Unix fundamentals. Talk given by Cian Synnott (pooka) this Tuesday, 23rd of March, 7pm. LG26 (School of Computing). "UNIX fundamentals. The talk will be rooted (ho ho) in the idea that the OS needs to share computer resources between different programs and protect each from the others. I'll cover the id...eas of user and kernel space, the central abstraction of the process and its lifecycle, an aside on memory organization/management, and the file system. I won't just be talking easily-forgotten crap though; I'll be demonstrating everything using everyday UNIX tools like ps, ls, strace, etc." == Geek meets == This Thursday, 25th March, we're gonna have our first geek meet up. Basically we're just gonna meet up, start up projects together and chat about techy stuff. There may be a few sweets and drinks thrown in too. So shall be fun :) == Coding Contest == Just a reminder that the coding contest was extended till the 29th of March. So there's still time to enter. What you have to do again can be found here: http://techweek.dcu.ie/blog/3 The prizes will be as followed: For the easy contest the winner will get an external hard drive. For the advanced one the winner get a 22 inch LG HD monitor. In both contests 2nd prize is an 8gb usb stick and 3rd prize is free redbrick membership for next year. == Quiz == Next Tuesday the 30th of March we're having our annual Table quiz in the Oldbar. The raffle prize is a Dell Mini netbook and prizes for the winning teams include portable harddrives and cool gadgets. Till next week, Emma :) -- Redbrick - Secretary 2009/2010 If practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, why practice? Save the Earth. It's the only planet with Chocolate :)

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Downtime Friday 19th (Tomorrow) at 5pm
by Eoghan Cotter 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

Redbrick will be rebooted tomorrow evening (19th March) at 5pm in order to facilitate kernel updates to our machines, this downtime shouldn't take longer then one hour to complete. The Admin team apologises for any inconvenience caused. -- Eoghan Cotter DCU Networking Society (Redbrick) Sys Admin

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Botwars || Admin Training || Coding Contest || Geek Meet ups || Hoodies || Upcoming Events
by Emma G 14 Mar '10

14 Mar '10

Welcome to week 6, == Admin Training == Admin training resumes this week. It will be held tomorrow, Monday 15th March, at 7pm. This session will cover advanced networking, switching, routing and firewalling. It will be held in LG26 in the School of Computing. == Botwars == Congratulations to the DCU teams who took part in the coding contest in Galway at the weekend. Two DCU teams took on two NUIG CompSoc teams and basically spend all weekend building and coding a mechanical Lego robot from scratch. The winner of the Botwars contest was our very own DCU team which consisted of Conor Lynch, Tom Cashman and Thomas Butler and the other DCU team which consisted of Lotta Mikkonen and Conor Forde managed to come third. Overall a victorious weekend for DCU :) == Coding Contest == Redbrick is pleased to announce it's coding competition for 2010! There are two levels of difficulty - easy and hard, and anyone is free to enter either (although non first years will be judged far more harshly in the easy category). The easier of the two categories is to implement the board game, snakes and ladders. You may use any language and any tools on any platform. Points will be awarded for the best thought out solution, good quality code, general shininess and other nice things like that. Lots of points for making us laugh. The second, more difficult of the two contests (this one aimed at everyone else, although of course first years are welcome to enter) is to implement a program that is able to tell where you are in the DCU campus using your laptop, or other mobile device. The only rules are that you may not use any built-in location services on the device, such as built-in GPS or Google Maps location services. Other then that, you're free to implement the solution using any programming language on any platform. Prizes for both competitions will be a subset of epic (they'll be announced in the next couple of days). For both competitions you get extra points (and so a better chance of winning) for any extra/cool features you can think of to build on top of your solution. You lose points for using brainfuck or whitespace, we don't want to have to judge that :) There'll also be spot prizes if we think you deserve one. The deadline for the competition is Monday, 22nd of March. Get coding! == Geek Meet ups == Postponed due to admin training this week. We'll tell you more about it in the next announce. == Hoodies == Ok so there's a small problem with the hoodies. The company we got them off mixed up our orders so we're currently exchanging them for our correct ones. We'll keep you up to date when we know more about when we'll be getting them. == Upcoming Events == Tuesday 30th March - Annual Table Quiz - Oldbar. Have a fun week, Till next week, Emma :) -- Redbrick - Secretary 2009/2010 If practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, why practice? Save the Earth. It's the only planet with Chocolate :)

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Redbrick Coding Contest || Techweek Change of Schedule
by Lotta Mikkonen 09 Mar '10

09 Mar '10

Hi everyone, ==Redbrick Coding Contest== Feel like a challenge? Redbrick is pleased to announce it's coding competition for 2010! There are two levels of difficulty - easy and hard, and anyone is free to enter either (although non first years will be judged far more harshly in the easy category). The easier of the two categories is to implement the board game, snakes and ladders. You may use any language and any tools on any platform. The second, more difficult of the two contests (this one aimed at everyone else, although of course first years are welcome to enter) is to implement a program that is able to tell where you are in the DCU campus using your laptop, or other mobile device. For full details see : http://techweek.dcu.ie/blog/3 ==Change of Schedule== We have had a small change of plan for tomorrow. The schedule for the following days are now as follows: --Wednesday-- 2pm - Declan Tuite (School of Communications) - Interesting Past Multimedia Talks - QG22 3pm - Jeffrey Roe(Tog.ie) - Hackerspaces - QG22 4pm - Sean Hand - Build Your Own PC - QG22 5pm - Q-Zar. Meet in Hub. Sign-up : https://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/events/signup/?eventid=12 Refreshments will be provided. Strong possibility of pizza. --Thursday-- 6pm - Dave O'Connor (Google) - Sustainable Computing - QG22 7pm - Laura Czajkowski (Ubuntu.ie) - CG04 8pm - Sci-Fi Quiz (Strange Things) - Nubar Entry to the quiz is free. Refreshments between talks. Best of luck! Lotta Redbrick Chair 09/10

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Techweek || Upcoming Events
by Emma G 07 Mar '10

07 Mar '10

Hey Redbrickers, Techweek is finally here and that means awesome techy events all this week. ==Techweek== So what do we have in store for you, you ask? We have Qzar, talks on various techy topics, a quiz, a filmshowing and a trip to Galway to compete in Botwars, a robotics and coding intervarsity. So there's something fun for all :) Below is the proper list of when and what's happening each day this week. So *Drum Roll* Redbrick, Gamessoc and Strange Things present: **Monday 8th March** 1pm - Jeffrey Roe (tog.ie) - Hackerspaces - C166 7.30 - Launch party - Nubar **Tuesday 9th March** 6pm - Tom Cashman - Game Design - Q220 7pm - Eoghan Gaffney (Demonware) - Django 8pm - Strange Things - Film - CG02 **Wednesday 10th March** 2pm - Declan Tuite (School of Communications) - Interesting past Multimedia projects - QG22 4pm - Sean Hand - Build your own PC - QG22 5pm - QZar - Meet in the Hub **Thursday 11th March** 6pm - Dave O'Connor (Google) - Sustainable Computing - QG22 7pm - Laura Czajkowski (Ubuntu-ie) - Ubuntu Ireland - CG04 8pm - Strange Things Sci-Fi Quiz, Nubar **Friday 12th - Sunday 13th March** Botwars with NUIG Galway (Attendees will be contacted soon) ==Upcoming Events== Admin Training (Ongoing) 12th - 14th March - Botwars (Galway) Monday 15th March - Geekmeets begin Tuesday 30th March - Annual Table Quiz - Oldbar. Saturday 17th April - UCC Coding Contest (Cork) That's it for this week. Till next time, Emma :) -- Redbrick - Secretary 2009/2010 If practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, why practice? Save the Earth. It's the only planet with Chocolate :)

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