Monday, February 6th at 5:15 - 6:15pm, vi tutorial

We'll be leading an introduction and tutorial on using the text editor with maximum geek cred, vi. Mice will be involved, so you won't even have to learn that 'k' means 'up' if you don't want to. We'll be meeting in the "art lab" in the CTLM, room 231, second floor, end of the hall.

Saturday, November 5th at 11:00am - ?, LAN Party at Marcus's House

The faculty/student LAN party will be starting at 11 a.m. It will be ending when everyone leaves. Feel free to come by at anytime. The LAN party will be hosted at Marcus's house located at 3360 Wright Street, Wheat ridge CO 80033. It's about 5-10 min from campus. If you get lost along the way, call Marcus at 720-234-4687. If you have any tables that you can bring, it would be a big help. Otherwise, we'll have to get inventive with table space. We'll be ordering pizza and have soda. Donations are welcome to keep the ACM buget stable but are not required. Below is a link to mapquest with directions for getting to Marcus's house from on campus. Mapquest Directions

Monday, November 7th at 5:00-6:00pm, room to be determined.

Dr. Rockwood will be presenting a showcase of past entries to the computer animation festival, held at the annual ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.

Monday, November 14th at 5:00-6:00pm, room to be determined.

Dr. Phil Romig III, the Colorado School of Mines' Computing Center's Campus Network
Manager and Network Security Officer will be giving us a talk about the campus network. He'll be covering the basics such as the physical layout of the Mines network, the theory of network layers, and other material drawn from his vast experience, Anything that people would like to see covered in detail, let us know beforehand, and we can pass a request onto Dr. Romig.

Friday the 27th of February at noon in CTLM102. 

Food and drinks will be served outside the lecture hall during the first 10 minutes.  As usual, students, faculty, and everyone else are welcome.

During the past few years, there has been a huge boom in the field of computer security. It seems that the more popular computers and software become, the more popular it is to find ways to exploit them. This presentation will focus on a few specific types of attacks that have been used over the years, and the methods that were created to defend against them.
We will talk about some common types of exploits, such as buffer overflows, packet modification, and memory editing.  We will first look into what the general idea is behind the exploit.  Then we will take a look at how it can be applied to a specific case, which to make the presentation more interesting will relate to games. Finally we will look at what can be done to prevent them.  By the end of the presentation you will understand how a GameGenie was able to let you cheat in old Nintendo games, and why Microsoft's Xbox console will only play real games among other things. 
This presentation will be both educational and interesting.  Security is a very fun topic, and while we can't cover everything, we do think this will give you a nice introduction on the subject in a context that everyone can relate to.

Thursday the 12th of February from 4:00-5:00 pm CTLM102. 

This next presentation will be a fun tutorial that should be helpful to anyone who might be upgrading or purchasing a computer. As usual, everyone is welcome. This presentation will cover the basics of what you need to know to make informed decisions in designing a computer. Whether you are planning on building your own computer from the ground up, considering upgrading in the future, or buying a prepackaged system, this presentation will help you answer the questions you need to ask yourself so you can make the right choice. By the end of the lecture everyone should have the information they need to be able to decide what computer would be the best for them. We will cover topics such as what kind of processor should you get, what kind of ram is needed, how much hard drive space do you really need and most importantly, how much do you really need to spend?

We will discuss everything from the bare basics, such as what parts you need, to the difference between an 64 bit AMD FX-51 and an 800 MHz fsb Pentium 4 3.2 GHz w/ HT. After talking about all of the details, we will design a complete computer, hand picking every part. Computers have evolved a lot during the past few years, there are now many different decisions that need to be made when buying a computer. If you think that you might be faced with making some of those decisions, then this is the presentation for you. If there is enough interest at this event, then the next presentation will be a tutorial on how to build a computer from the ground up.

Friday the 30th of January from 12:00-1:00 pm in CTLM 102. 

Nov. (Time & Place TBD)  -  Introduction to .NET and C#

Both of these are currently becoming the standard in the business world. It is definitely a good idea to become familiar with them if you are going to be working in industry. .NET and C# are both very large subjects, with a broad range of topics that can be covered. This tutorial will be aimed at explaining what .NET is, and a little bit about the pros/cons and who can benefit from it. It will also cover the basics of C#, what the fundamental design concepts are, as well what a c++/java programmer needs to know about it. This session will be more of a lecture than a hands on tutorial, but we will give you resources too learn more about .NET and C# if you are interested. Once we finalized a date and time, we will let you all know.

Nov. 5, 2003 (5-6pm), CTLM 231  -  Tutorial on Makefiles
      

It will be a hands on tutorial that will help you to learn how to take advantage of Makefiles, rather than dreading having to use one. If you've done much programming on a Unix/Linux environment you've probably been through some of the hassle it takes to compile code. Many people will simply type 'g++ -g -Wall main.cpp -o demo' at the command line to get their code to compile. The situation becomes more complex when multiple files are added. The purpose of our first tutorial is to show how compiling your code doesn't have to be a hassle. With the help of Makefiles you can easily compile your code at the command line with one simple statement. We will also talk about libraries, which make it easier to reuse your code. A lot of people are intimidated by Makefiles and libraries, but both are very helpful. It might seem like a good idea to take your old Makefile and change all of it to work with your new project, but there are much simpler ways to do it. After this tutorial you will be able to create a Makefile from scratch, to compile any project, in just a minute or two.

This will save you much of a headache when compiling. Makefiles are surprisingly easy to write/understand.