Awesome visits to IT companies this week!

We have had a great time this week, and thank you to everyone whom attended. This Macquarie sign is from the top of their new “activity-based” building at Shelley St. For those who missed out, it’s not like any other office buildings you’ve ever seen before. Keep an eye out for when SUITS runs another one of these extraordinary visits again perhaps next year!

I want to take this opportunity to thank Will from Google, Robyn from Atlassian and Larissa from our sponsor Optiver whom have worked with me throughout the time leading up. A special thanks goes to Anna from Macquarie because she has made our visit possible even at such short notice! They have put in so much effect to make this all possible, and it’s easy for this effort to go unnoticed.

I promised to make the photos available, and here it is after the break. I’ve only included low-res photos here, but feel free to click through to get to the full quality photos. The links and resources are also after the break.

Feedback. I’d love to know what you thought about this event. Send me an email with any thoughts or comments, in particular:

1. What did you get out of the day?
2. Which parts did you like best (and/or didn’t like), and why?
3. How can we make this event even better for next time?

Read more »

Tonight’s AGM decides the future of SUITS

It’s that time of the year folks! Sydney University IT Society held its fourth Annual General Meeting tonight to elect the executive team for the period from the rest of the year to roughly the same time next year. This is the night that decides the future of SUITS.

So it means I’ll be retiring from my current position as Industry Liaison, and I won’t be running for another position this year. Why? I would like to see more participation from the fresh recruits, and one way is to give a sense of ownership. I’ve been an executive of the Computer Science Undergraduate Society (CSUS), which in 2007 unified and merged with two other societies, and have been an executive since.

Anyway, I’m going to reveal the newly elected executives before it even gets out onto their website!

• President: Stephen Merity
• Vice President: Aaron Cowie
• Treasurer: Adam Petrovic
• Secretary: Karmen Chong
• Events coordinator: James Alexander
• Public relations: Simon Mattes
• Industry Liaison: Adam Gawronski
• Undergraduate representative: Luke Anderson
• Postgraduate Rep:
• IT Officer: Greg Darke

Yes, the IT society actually needs IT infrastructure support. That’s why there’s a dedicated position just to take care of servers and all things technical.

R.I.P suitsbeta, the death of SUITS server

If you’ve recently accessed Sydney University IT Society’s website, you might have noticed that it loaded rather slowly. About an hour later, I received an HTTP 500 while trying to get to the website, and it won’t even come up.

Later today, our IT guy sent an email with the subject “The death of suitsbeta”:

At approximately 1445 today, suitsbeta shut itself down, never to wake up again. Attempts were made to revive it by powering it up, but alas it failed to POST. Our thoughts go out to its family and friends.

Tim

So it turns out that our trusty server that hosted our website has kicked the bucket after its dedicated service to the society. Even though it has graduated from ‘beta’ so that the internal DNS name of ‘suits’ pointed to it, it will always be remembered as ‘suitsbeta’.

It was Pentium 4 1.6 GHz, with only 768MB of memory and less hard disk space than your average laptop.

I was fortunate enough to be with it in its final moments, and watched while it booted into the linux 2.6 kernel. It took minutes upon minutes to check even a few megabytes of the kernel image to see if it is initramfs.

Anyway, we are currently in search of a new server, and let’s look forward to a newer and better machine. Maybe even virtualise the server so disaster recovery is a bit less painful.

#!SUITS Camp – Planning is under way!

Spent the afternoon with other SUITS execs planning for the 2009 edition of the annual #!SUITS camp. At this stage, things are looking quite exciting.

From last year, we’re had feedback that going and visiting IT companies around Sydney was quite a valuable experience. So we’re going to keep this going this year, with an added fun component to the camp. Hmm, I’ll still need to speak with companies and see who’ll be willing to take us for a tour of their workplace… *writes into diary*

Also learning from last year, the massive projects that we initially had in mind didn’t entirely work out given such time constraints, so we’ve decided to cut this out in favour of shorter challenges instead.

Here’s the official details we’re going to announce (I know I’m leaking confidential info, but hey it gets around the fixed schedule of newsletters!):

• It’s going to run for 4 days, in the last week of the holidays between semester. (20-23 Jul 09)
• The cost of the camp is yet to be finalised… but al meals will be included in the cost!

Oh, did I mention scavenger hunt?

SUITS Annual General Meeting 2008

Today was the Sydney University IT Society AGM, which went for an incredibly long amount of time as we elected new members onto our executive team. As for myself, my position at SUITS has changed from Vice President to Industry Liaison.

Ah, A change in scenery. Hello Mr. Industry, here I come to liaise with you!