Termcard for Trinity Term 2007

Pubmeet

Wednesday 25th April, 20:30
King's Arms

Come and enjoy the delightful company of fellow CompSoc members, discover what wonderfully interesting things people did over the vacation, and start tormenting the new committee.

Second Life and IBM

Speaker: Ian Hughes

Wednesday 2nd May, 20:30
Sainsbury Common Room, Worcester College

Ian Hughes talks on Second Life and IBM, and how virtual worlds are impacting the company and others:

Ian Hughes, a.k.a. 'epredator potato' in Second Life, is an IBM Consulting IT Specialist who has worked on leading edge emerging technologies for the past 17 years, a programmer since he was 14. He is now officially an IBM Metaverse Evangelist having led in bands of colleagues into Second Life for the past year with a view to understanding what the social, business and technical implications are of virtual world technology used with a web 2.0 mentality and user generated content. What makes this work now? What has caused the massive increase in usage from 70,000 to 4.2 million registrations in less than a year? How can business become involved without killing the spirit? Who are we online?

Head for the Porter's Lodge at Worcester; there will be someone there to guide you to the Sainsbury Common Room.

How To Make An Indie PC Game

Speaker: Ian Hardingham

Wednesday 9th May, 20:30
Roy Griffiths Room, Keble College

In 2003 Ian Hardingham graduated in computer science from Oriel. He immediately set up his game development company, Mode 7 Games. With no investment and very little experience, he and a team of five students set to work on a stupidly ambitious title — Determinance: a freeform flying sword-fighting game. Nearly four years later, Determinance is a success, Mode 7 have a publisher, and they are diversifying into Nintendo DS and Wii games.

This Wednesday Ian will come to tell us:

• The best ways to get started in the indie industry.
• The technology and communities worth getting involved with.
• How to deal with your artists quitting to become carpenters.
• The truth about how much money you can make selling games online.
• How important Mac and Linux actually are to indies.
• What to do when EA give you an audience - but they think you're crazy.
• What not to name your games. (Don't call them anything as stupid as Determinance.)

There will be someone at the Keble Porters' Lodge to guide you to the talk.

DBIx Class and Catalyst

Speaker: Matt Trout

Wednesday 16th May, 20:30
(venue to be announced)

Matt Trout will be giving a talk on DBIx::Class and Catalyst. An abstract and further details will be available soon.

Being Google - Building your own search engine from scratch

Speaker: Tom Dyson

Tuesday 22nd May, 20:30
Pusey Room, Keble College

Tom Dyson, of Torchbox, will talk about the challenges involved with parsing and indexing text, along with code examples and details of real world implementations.

Termly General Meeting

Thursday 7th June, 20:00
Big Bang

The Termly General Meeting, an opportunity to voice your opinions, hear what the committee have been up to this term, and enjoy some good food.