SUITS Seminar

Thursday 15 May marks the day for yet another #!SUITS seminar. Just an overview, the Sydney University IT Society have been running these seminars ever since the society is formed. Recently, we have changed the format so that during the hour, we have two guest speakers.

Today, our first speaker is Meitar Mozcovitz, who is a passionate web developer. Yes, a REAL web developer who actually cares about users and other developers. That’s why he came and chatted to us about a good way to make documentation useful.

I’m trying to get hold of his presentation, and once I do, they’ll be put up onto the #!SUITS tutorials page.

The second speaker was Prof. Jon Patrick, from our very own School of IT at University of Sydney. His talk was about how natural language processing techniques can be used to solve headaches around inconsistent medical terminology used everywhere. As part of his research, an intelligent system with was created that could interpret thousands of notes and messages, even ones using funny medical symbols and terminology, and produce a formally structured report using standard terminology. Sounds good? Well it’s even more so since it’s pluggable to any existing system without major changes. Ah, the possibilities..

Update: O-Week USYD Prize Draw Winners

Congrats again to Paul, Sheila and Cleslie for winning the prizes!

Left: Paul with his Halo 2 Game prize.

Centre: Cleslie with her Expression Web prize.

Right: Sheila Uyriwoth with her 1GB USB drive.

O-Week USYD: Prize draw winners

The Sydney University IT Society have had a great success at O-Week, signing up more than 200 members in 3 days. Since this is the end of O-Week, I also have great news to announce. Winners for the daily prize draw:

• The Wednesday prize: Microsoft Expression Web
  Cleslie Figuron
• The Thursday prize: 1GB USB thumb drive
  Sheila Uyirwoth
• The Friday prize: HALO 2 game
  Paul Lui

Congratulations to those winners of our wonder O-Week daily prize draw. If you are a winner, you will be in contact shortly by email. If I still can’t make contact with you before next Friday 7 Mar 08, then another name will be drawn out of the box as the winner instead.

Now for the major prize for joining SUITS during O-Week. Thanks to Optiver, we have a black iPod Nano to give away during O-Week. The winning person must have joined SUITS during O-Week, and be at the SIT Welcome on Friday, when it is drawn. This time, the winner of the major prize is James Bank. Congratulations, and thank you for coming to the SIT welcome. We hope that you’ll enjoy using your new iPod.

Thanks to everyone who has joined SUITS or renewed their membership this year, and I’ll be looking forward to exciting events coming up very soon.

Update: All prizes have been claimed, so there won’t be any redraws.

O-Week USYD – Look out for SUITS

The Sydney Uni O-Week kicks off tomorrow, and get ready for loads of fun! I’ll be taking lots of photos, so I’ll be blogging them too.

But for now, here’s what to look out for: SUITS will host massive FREE O-Week LAN games during all 3 days, so make your way down to Carslaw Lab 202A to catch some of the action. We’ll show you how we do LANs our way – games running on a fully customised live distribution of linux. Games include StarCraft, Enemy Territory, FreeCiv and more!

Make sure though, that you remember to find our store. This year, we are located at a prime location – stall number 70, right at the intersection of two main paths. Find number stall 70 on the official O-Week map.

Back at the stall, we’re going to have a daily prize giveaway. It’s easy to enter; just answer 2 questions on the entry form and put it into the entry box at the stall. Prizes will be drawn every day of O-Week at 2:00pm, so don’t miss it! The prizes include Microsoft Expression Web, 1GB USB drive, and Microsoft HALO 2. Remember, all you have to do is fill out that entry form.

Just a hint for those wanting to know the name of the guy from It’s Not Cheating, find him on Facebook! How to find him? Well he’s my friend. Good luck!

Gotta get some sleep now before everything starts, because these few days of O-Week is going to be so exciting.

Update 27 Feb 08: Due to certain factors, the draw will now be done at the end of each day. The first drawn entry form with a valid email address will be the winner. Winners will be notified by email and names published onto the SUITS Wiki by the end of O-Week.

MSP BootCamp 2008

The Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) program is one that is quite interesting, yet few know about it. To give a brief overview, it’s where bubbly and enthusiastic students like myself to go out and give out what Microsoft is already offering to the student community. Despite what many people think, Microsoft isn’t just concerned about making software. They also want to give something back to the community. That’s where we come into the picture.

So a bunch of MSPs from all over Australia got together today at Microsoft’s head office at Sydney, and kicked off the year of 2008. So begins the fun begins for the year. Let’s take a look at what we did today.

We started off with a recap of the events last year, taking a look at our events that happened last year. Nick introduced us to Karo, the new intern at Microsoft who’ll be taking over Nick’s role after his 1-year internship finishes. It looks like we’re in for an exciting year this year.

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