Hello Brickies, Hope you've all enjoyed the holidays. We've a fair few announcements to make. This will be a busy spring! ==Week 1== Thursday 11th February at 7pm we will be holding our first talk of the semester. The title for this talk is "Real World Low level optimisation" and it will be presented by Colm McCarthaigh (colmmacc). This talk will cover optimisation and performance hacks that are rooted in low-level details of how systems work, but are also applicable and usable in high level programming languages such as Java and Python. Caching, pipelining and probing strategies, performance-oriented data-structure design and statistical profiling. But don't worry, each topic will be covered in plain language and explained from the ground up, and hopefully we'll have some fun along the way. We will be following this up with food and pints. (Venues TBC) ==Hoodies== Unfortunately due to issues with the hoodie companies we have had to postpone this hoodie order. We will be in touch as soon as we have something else sorted out. ==Bletchley Park Trip== This trip has now been booked. The dates for this trip are 1-3 of February. If you would like to fund your own travel and join us email attol@redbrick.dcu.ie for further information. ==NUIG CompSoc Botwars== Always wanted to try your hand at building your own fighting robot? Interested in robotics? http://www.compsoc.nuigalway.ie/wiki/botwars/ This massive robotics event will be held in NUIG on the 5th and the 6th of February in NUI Galway. Competitions that are scheduled : Design Build, Code Challenge -This one day challenge requires you to use all your skill to design, construct and program a robot in less than a day! Intervarsity Wars -Challenge robots from other universities for a chance to win the grand prize. If you are interested in participating please reply to this email asap. If there are enough people interested we can see if we can get funding for this. ==TOG Engineering Workshops== TOG (www.tog.ie for more info) will be hosting a series of events for Engineers Week (8 - 14 February). There are events on each night of the week on many different topics. All of the weekday events are free but require pre booking. The weekend Workshop’s require a fee for participation. The workshops will cover topics such as amateur radio, soldering and robotics. For a full list of events see the following link. Engineers Week @ TOG 8 - 14 February. http://www.tog.ie/2010/01/engineers-week/ As always, if you have any suggestions about what you'd like to see a talk or workshop on or if you'd like to comment in general, please don't hesitate to email us. Best of luck in the exams! Lotta Redbrick Chair 09/10