- csc-general - CSC Mailman

Elections for Fall 2012 Executive Tomorrow
by Computer Science Club 17 Sep '12

17 Sep '12

Howdy, The nomination period for this term's executive has now closed. Elections are Tuesday ( tomorrow ) at 4PM in the MC Comfy on the third floor. Candidates are as follows: President Marc Burns ( m4burns ) Jesse Onland ( jdonland ) William Ritchie ( wlritchi ) Vice-President Salem Talha ( satalha ) Kush Patel ( khpatel ) William Ritchie ( wlritchi ) Treasurer Marc Burns ( m4burns ) Salem Talha ( satalha ) Jonathan Bailey ( jj2baile ) Stephane Hamada ( sjthamad ) William Ritchie ( wlritchi ) Kush Patel ( khpatel ) Jennifer Wong ( jy2wong ) Secretary William Ritchie ( wlritchi ) Salem Talha ( satalha ) Andrei Thorp ( aapachin ) Elana Hashman ( ehashman ) Diane Snobelen ( dksnobel ) Once the executive have been elected, they will be selecting this term's Systems Administrator, Librarian, and Office Manager. If you think you are capable of holding any of these positions, be sure to come out and introduce yourself during the elections! Owen Smith Chief Returning Officer, Fall 2012

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syscom notice: Unexpected downtime on caffeine, mail
by Computer Science Club 12 Sep '12

12 Sep '12

Greetings, The CSC recently experienced some unexpected downtime on Sunday morning (09/09) from roughly 5AM for about 15+ hours, on the servers glomag, caffeine, and mail. The following services were affected: - www - mail delivery - mailman - smtp - imap - mysql - psql - ssh - webmail At this time, all these services have been fully restored. If there is a problem with using one or more of these services, please e-mail syscom with your inquiry. Minor issues may exist for some of our users who use the mbox delivery format on /var/mail. If you are one of these users, please note that your /var/mail has been archived to: - /var/mail-20120909 from before the crash on Sunday - /var/mail-20120512 from the mail host migration that occurred earlier this year We are working to consolidate all of these resources eventually, so please bear with us at this time. If you have no idea what mbox is, or you are currently using the Maildir delivery format, then your mail is unaffected. Having conducted some preliminary investigation into the matter, we have determined that the cause was due to resource exhaustion on one or more of our servers. It is important to note in this case that caffeine is the machine you will be on if you ssh directly to csclub.uwaterloo.ca . As such, we must remind our members that caffeine primarily acts as our webserver, and that members should avoid running resource-intensive tasks on this host, unless it is to act as a public-facing webservice. We have many other machines that are useful and better-equipped for running resource-intensive tasks, such as taurine, corn-syrup, and hfcs. A full list of our machines available can be found on our wiki: http://wiki.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/Machine_List Please be considerate: CSC systems are a shared resource, so actions you make on a system will affect all other users on that system. Cheers, -syscom

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Wine & Cheese / Code Party 0 / Palantir Tech Talk & Grad House Social
by Computer Science Club 11 Sep '12

11 Sep '12

Greetings, members! We welcome our new members and salute our veterans with a hearty EXTERMINATE. In addition to our elections on Tuesday, we have a few upcoming events we wanted to let you know about to kick off the term. MATH WINE AND CHEESE: Friday, Sept. 14, 5:30-7:00 PM, M3 Atrium --- Consider this to be a cordial invitation from MathSoc and the Dean's Office to attend the first annual wine and cheese social in the M3 Atrium this Friday. This will be an opportunity to chat with faculty, eat cheese, and drink wine---what could be better? Pick up invitations for your profs in the MathSoc Office (MC 3038). Dress is informal, but feel free to dress up if you'd like. The event is open to all ages. Do bring ID if you're planning on drinking. CODE PARTY 0 -- FROSH-A-THON: Friday, Sept. 14, 7:00 PM, Comfy Lounge (MC 3001) --- Our first code party of the term is this Friday, if you haven't seen the posters, with a loose "Linux installfest" theme for those interested. We will be providing (caffeinated!) drinks, pizza, and other delicious snacks for your hacking pleasure. This is also a recruiting event, so please make sure to bring your friends. We are not limited to members! PALANTIR TECH TALK & GRAD HOUSE SOCIAL: Thursday, Sept. 20, 6:30 PM, DC 1302 --- Palantir is back this term with another tech talk. Expect cool engineers, free shirts, goodies and food if you attend! After the talk, we will be moving the group to Grad House for free food and drinks, and an opportunity to chat with the Palantir reps and fellow attendees about life, the universe, and everything. Hope to see you at elections! -- Elana Hashman Secretary, Spring 2012 Computer Science Club University of Waterloo ehashman(a)uwaterloo.ca

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Fall 2012 Elections Have Begun
by Computer Science Club 11 Sep '12

11 Sep '12

Greetings members! The election period for Fall 2012 Computer Science Club executive has begun! Come down to the MC Comfy Lounge on Tuesday September 18, 2012 at 4:00PM, where elections will be held for this term's President, Vice-President, Treasurer and Secretary. Sysadmin, Librarian and Office Manager selections will also occur at this time. Nominations will run until Monday September 17, 2012 at 4:00PM. You can submit a nomination ( including yourself ) by writing the person's user id in the nomination chart on the office whiteboard. Alternatively, you may e-mail nominations to this term's CRO at cro(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca . We're holding our first "welcome back" code party of the term on Friday September 14th! Come join us in the MC Comfy Lounge (MC 3001). Whether you're a hacking guru or a newbie to computer science, you're welcome to attend; there will be activities for all! Our party is loosely themed as a Linux installfest, where we will have a team of members dedicated to helping individuals install and learn to use one of many flavours of Linux. Everyone is welcome, so please bring your friends. There will be foodstuffs and sugary drinks available for your hacking pleasure. With warm regards, Calum T. Dalek Chairbeing Extraordinaire

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Possible Downtime (all csc machines)
by Computer Science Club 29 Aug '12

29 Aug '12

The CSC will be migrating server racks sometime in the next few weeks. We will be getting new UPSes, so most machines will experience brief downtime as they have to be physically moved. *We have allotted 2 hours for the migration process*, but hosts and services may be up before that time. The following CSC hosts will be high priority for migration as they affect all our services, thus we will aim to reduce downtime for these hosts as much as possible: - ginseng - glomag (caffeine, mail) - sodium-benzoate (mirror) Additionally, our switch will also be migrated, so network connectivity will be temporarily interrupted. All other hosts will be migrated as quickly as possible, and will not have service during the some period of the migration. All services will be affected, and all machines will at some point be shut down. Because of this, **please be wary of starting new long-term running jobs** on any of the CSC hosts over the next few weeks. Currently the estimated day and time for migration is: *Friday, August 31, afternoon.* Another e-mail will be sent on the actual day of migration to confirm this. Please forward any inquiries to syscom(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca . Cheers.

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Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference 2012
by Computer Science Club 30 May '12

30 May '12

Hail, membership! Consider this a special invitation to undergraduate students that would like to attend CUMC 2012! For those of you that are not familiar with CUMC, it is the Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, and is being held this year at UBC Okanagan Campus, in Kelowna, British Columbia. (A gorgeous city, especially in the summer!) It will be a great experience for all those interested in mathematics. Regardless of your personal ability in mathematics, the conference is aimed at an undergraduate level, and all undergraduate mathematics students will be able to take something away from it. We will be departing by plane on Tuesday, July 10th in the afternoon, and will be returning in the evening on Sunday, July 15. All airfare and accommodations are generously funded by the Mathematics Endowment Fund (MEF), the Mathematics Society (MathSoc), and the Dean's Office. If you are interested in attending, please contact either myself directly (ehashman(a)uwaterloo.ca) Joseph Horan (jahoran(a)uwaterloo.ca) or email cumc2012(a)mathsoc.uwaterloo.ca. Joseph will also be operating a booth on the third floor of the MC during lunchtimes, right outside the CSC, if you have any questions. You will need to pay your conference fee online before we can consider you officially signed up. You can do this at http://cumc.math.ca . The conference fee is $95. We may have to levy a small additional transportation fee for buses (~$25) if our funding does not cover costs entirely. You'll also be responsibile for your own personal incidental expenses, but everything else should be covered! We have limited space for 40 students, so please make sure that you pay your conference fee and contact either myself or Joseph as soon as possible. I hope to see you boarding a plane with me in a little over a month, -- Elana Hashman CUMC 2012 UW Trip Planning Committee

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Scheduled Downtime (caffeine, mail) 2AM-6AM on Tuesday, May 15
by Computer Science Club 12 May '12

12 May '12

The following CSC hosts will be down for scheduled maintenance from 2AM-6AM on Tuesday, May 15th: - caffeine - mail - wiki - git - rt Details of maintenance include: - migrating mail to its own container - This means that caffeine and mail will no longer point to the same host. If you are currently using caffeine.csclub as your mail host to send/receive mail, *please change* this to mail.csclub ASAP. This includes related services such as imap, pop3, and webmail. Forwarded mail will be unaffected. - migrating mailman to the new mail.csclub - aliasing mailman.csclub to mail.csclub - miscellaneous fixes to caffeine The following services will be affected: - mail - mailman - apache - mysql - postgresql - ssh - pop3 - imap If you are currently logged into caffeine for general-purpose computing (irc, etc.) please transition to a different CSC server before Tuesday. There will be another reminder on Monday evening. Cheers.

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Elections! / Palantir Tech Talk
by Computer Science Club 02 May '12

02 May '12

Hello all! I hope you had a nice break between terms. We're going to kick off the spring term fast, so get ready. ELECTIONS: Thursday, May 10, 4:30 PM, Comfy Lounge (MC 3001) --- Calum T. Dalek asked me to relay the details of the election. We will be holding the election at 4:30 PM in the Comfy Lounge on May 10th. Nominations are now open, so feel free to write your nominations on the whiteboard in the CSC office, or email them to cro(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca. PALANTIR TECH TALK: "mmap and the Mortgage Crisis" by Palantir Engineers; Monday, May 7, 6:00 PM, DC 1302 --- Palantir is a Palo Alto-based intelligence analysis software company that has partnered with the CSC to put on a tech talk and social. There will be free food, free drinks, and for one lucky winner, a free iPad, so why not come on out? Abstract: In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, large banks have been saddled with the prospect of foreclosing on millions of distressed mortgages, at a financial cost of billions of dollars and an incalculable social cost. Crucial to solving this problem is the ability to model and analyze these millions of loans in real time, enabling lenders to price homes so that they can find effective and mutually beneficial alternatives to foreclosure. In this talk, we'll describe how engineers at Palantir are working on a calculation engine that supports such analyses. We’ll outline our design goals of constructing a platform that supports queries against large sets of data at interactive speeds and exposes a high-level object-oriented interface that enables analysts to construct models intuitively without having to worry about the underlying implementation details. We’ll describe the different architectures we explored in prototyping the system, demo how to use our product to analyze massive datasets, and discuss how we've ultimately deployed it in the field. Details: Monday, May 7th 6:00 - 7:30pm DC 1302 Free dinner and drinks after the talk at McGinnis FrontRow! For more details about Palantir and information about their info session earlier in the day, please see their csc-industry post: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/csc-industry/2012-May/000030.html Good luck in all your classes this semester, or whatever endeavors you may be enjoying the next few months. I hope to see you out at the elections and talk---mark your calendars! ^_^ -- Elana Hashman Vice-President, Winter 2012 Computer Science Club University of Waterloo ehashman(a)uwaterloo.ca

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PSP Left in the CSC Office
by Computer Science Club 28 Apr '12

28 Apr '12

If you lost a PSP recently, CSC may have it. Come by the office and ask office staff. You will need to provide evidence that the PSP is yours (e.g. knowledge of the contents of its memory card.) Thanks

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Prof Talk: Multi-processor Real-time Systems
by Computer Science Club 20 Mar '12

20 Mar '12

Greetings, members! This Thursday, at 4:30 PM in MC 4021, the CSC will be hosting a talk by professor Bill Cowan on Multi-processor Real-time Systems. Here's an abstract: ------ Programming systems that obey hard real-time constraints is difficult. So is programming multiple CPUs that interact to solve a single problem. On rare occasions it is possible to mix two difficult problems to create one easy problem and multi-CPU real-time is, on the face of it, just such an occasion. Give each deadline its own CPU and it will never be missed. This intuition is, unfortunately, incorrect, which does not, however, prevent it being tried in many real-time systems. For three decades, fourth year students have been exploring this problem in CS452, using multiple tasks (virtual CPUs) running on a single CPU. It is now time to consider whether modern developments in CPU architecture make it possible to use multiple CPUs in CS452 given the practical constraint of a twelve week semester. This talk will describe the nature of computation typical of real-time systems, architectural solutions currently employed in the course, and possible architectures for multi-CPU systems. ------ Drinks will be served; we hope to see you there! Regards, Marc Burns President, University of Waterloo Computer Science Club.

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