Sydney Uni Students Gets New Outlook Live Email Service

Just received an email from the ICT guys at Sydney Uni – all students are getting a new email service! According to ICT Switch, the email service is going to be the new hosted services from Microsoft, called Outlook Live. It means that there’s finally a decent user interface to the university email, plus seamless Outlook integration!

This is great new, because unlike Hotmail (or Windows Live Mail), hosted Outlook services are Ad-Free! Or so I hope. Which means, we’ll be getting the best email services without the unnecessary advertising. Also, we’ll be able to keep the email address even after leaving uni, which is absolutely awesome. It’s a good thing that it means the uni doesn’t have to manage (and pay for) the mail services even for students whom have left.

The only issue is, I’d have to change my uni email address, and changing emails addresses is never fun. Thank goodness that I can keep this email address forever.

I tried to log onto my new email account today at https://www.outlook.com/, but it appears that it hasn’t been activated yet. Can’t wait until it kicks off on 6 May 09!

A copy of the email can be found after the break.

Read more »

Public Lecture on the Australian Internet Filtering Scheme

This Friday, there’ll be a public lecture discussing the Australian Filtering Scheme. It’s been a hot topic for a while now, and it’s gathering momentum. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TV program Q&A had recently featured this particular issue last Thursday 26 Mar 09 in Melbourne.

The lecture will be delivered by Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt (my thesis supervisor!) from School of IT, University of Sydney. His comments were also featured in the Herald.

Here’s more details, from the school’s news page:

Speaker: Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt, School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney

Time: Friday 3 April 2009, 4:00-5:00pm

Location: The University of Sydney, PNR Building, Farrell Lecture Theatre

Abstract
The Australian government is currently planning to introduce mandatory Internet content filtering. The move would clearly set Australia aside from all other democratic nations in the world. The initial purpose of this scheme was to protect Australian children from accessing unsuitable material such as child pornography.

Read more »

ENGG1801 Lab 3 Re-Cap

Announcement

• 5 new sets of SPOT quizzes are available. You can get to them through your USYD eLearning site.
• Quiz 1
  • Runs in the first hour of Week 5′s lab, 50 minutes long.
  • 10 multiple choice from Excel, 10 multiple choice from Matlab
  • Closed book – no internet / Excel / Matlab
  • Worth 10% of final assessment mark
  • Must attend the scheduled lab

Course material

(after the break!)

Read more »

ENGG1801 Lab 2 Re-Cap

Course material

In Lab 2 we finally got to play around with MATLAB, a calculator on steroids and a particularly useful engineering tool. We started it up, and wrote some programs both by typing straight into the ">>" prompt, and by creating scripts called m-files and then running that script by typing the name of that file.

We also stored some numbers as variable names, and used them in the calculations to same typing the numbers over and over again. We didn’t really get to indexing an array, but that’s something I want you all to have a play with before our next lab.

Also have a go at the Excel section, since it’s pretty easy and won’t take up much of your time at all. It’s all to do with applying what you’ve learnt in lab 1 to make the table, and then plotting them in an X-Y scatter plot, adding trendlines.

I’ll go through arrays/vectors/matrices operators at the start of the next lab.

Issues raised during the lab

More hints and tips about the lab after the break!

Read more »

ENGG1801 Lab 1 Re-Cap

Administrative matters

This is just a recap of our first lab this Wednesday. To start things off, I’d like to make sure that the administrative matters are dealt with before next lab. We skipped over these during the lab so that we can get as far into the actual course content as possible.

By now, everyone should be able to log onto the School of IT (SIT) undergraduate computers using your UniKey username and your SIT password. Note that the computers outside of the undergraduate labs are actually part of the postgraduate Masters of IT (MIT) lab, so don’t worry if you can’t log onto those.

So that was your SIT account. Now to get onto eLearning, you use your UniKey account to log onto MyUni. It’s pretty much the only website you need to remember for your Uni stuff including the eLearning link on the right hand side. (This is the Uni-wide account, not SIT specific.) Make sure that you know how to get to the lecture notes and the labs. The first Matlab lecture, Excel lecture and lab should be there already. Next, check out the Discussions section. I want you to go and make a test post on the Discussions if you haven’t done so already. It’s a good idea to stay tuned to the discussions page throughout the semester, because if you’re having trouble with something in ENGG1801, it’s very likely that someone else is also having the same problems.

Finally, jump to the SPOT exercises and try your hand at them. They’re not difficult, but they do reflect the topics we want you to understand as part of the course. It’s not assessable (in fact we can’t even see your scores), and they’re a great way to revise. Remember that your first quiz will be similar in style to the SPOT exercises.

Next lab, I’ll show you some hidden features about your USYD email account and perhaps some better ways of getting to your email.

Course material

Clarification points brought up in Lab 1:

Read more »