Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference

CUTC is a non-profit student organization whose mission is to create a forum for students, industry & academia to share ideas and discuss some of the future trends in technology. Students from various universities had gained great benefit from this conference in the past and we would like to make it even better this year, as CUTC 2010 marks our 11th year. We not only welcome students who are pursuing tech-related careers, but also anyone who would like to learn more about technology; who has an entrepreneurial spirit; or who just want to meet other like-minded peers.

More information can be found at: http://www.cutc.ca/

The conference will be held on April 29-30th. UofT has agreed to subsidize 75% of the registration cost for the first 100 registrants so sign up now!

CSSU Pre-Elections 2010

Hello everyone,

We are happy (and sad) to release this information about the upcoming elections for the CSSU 2010-2011 Executive Council positions. We are encouraging every Computer Science student to run for a position.

The CRO supervising the elections: Elias Adum

The Open Positions: President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Social Director, and First year Liaison

Nominations Period:

Start: Monday, March 8, 2010, 7am

End: Friday March 12, 2010, 5pm

Declaration of Candidacy

  • Each candidate must declare their intention to run for office before the end of the nomination period.
  • The declaration shall be made by sending an email listing the candidate’s name and the position they are running for to elias.adum@utoronto.ca.

Nominations Rules

  • To nominate one or more candidates a voter should fill our the nomination form, available both here and in the CSSU Office, and return the filled out form to the CSSU Office (if the office is closed for whatever reason, it suffices to slip the form under the door).
  • It is required that all nominators include their cdf login on the form, so that their eligibility to vote may be established.

Campaigning Period:

Start: Monday, March 15, 2010, 7am

End: Friday, March 19, 2010, 7am

Elections: Friday: March 19, 2010, 10am – 5pm

Elections Rules:

  • No candidate shall distribute leaflets for the purposes of campaigning.
  • Since the CSSU office will be used for administration of the election, the office may not be used by any candidate for the purposes of campaigning or planning of their campaign.
  • Prior to (or at any time during) the campaign period, each candidate may prepare a brief (no more than 300 words) statement along with a picture, to be posted on the CSSU website. These statements should be sent to elias.adum@utoronto.ca and will be posted on the CSSU website at the start of the campaign period.

General Rules:

For the sake of avoiding errors, the rules below do not include those set out in the constitution. It is strongly recommended that each candidate familiarize themselves with the rules in the constitution, as well as the rules below.

he rules below may be modified at any time, up until the beginning of the campaign period, with those modifications taking immediate effect. An effort will be made to alert declared candidates if and when the rules are modified, but it is the responsibility of each candidate to periodically check for updates, and the lack of notification will not be a valid defense in the case of an infraction.

If any candidate acts in contravention of the election rules they will first (if appropriate) be given a warning. A second offense, or any offense that is deemed to be damaging to the fair outcome of the election will be met with the immediate disqualification of the candidate in question.

The CRO for this election is Elias Adum. Questions or concerns about the election should be directed to his email address, elias.adum@utoronto.ca.

Advance Voting

  • Advance voting will be considered on an individual basis and should contact elias.adum@utoronto.ca for more details.
  • The voter will be given a ballot and an envelope. The filed out ballot must be returned to the CRO before the conclusion of voting on Friday.

sincerely,

Computer Science Student Union 2009-2010

Become a FLC Peer Mentor for 2010-2011!

Do you have a “top 10 list of things I wish I’d known as a first-year student”?
Would you like to make a difference in the lives of a group of first-year CS students?
Are you looking for valuable volunteer and leadership experience—not to mention earning a small honorarium in the process?
Are you dynamic and organized?

Then apply to become a FLC Peer Mentor for 2010-2011! (”FLC” is pronounced “flick” and stands for the “First-year Learning Communities” program of the Faculty of Arts and Science.)

Applications are due by Monday 22 March.

Visit the official FLC website for full details, including the application form.

Note that, although the FLC program is administered outside of our department, each of our Peer Mentors works with a single FLC group made up of first-year CS students.

Mobile startups

Two of the leading Mobile Startups in Toronto, Socialdeck and Xtreme Labs, will give a talk @ BA1200 on March 1, 4-5pm.

Details:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=302751484106

CSSU Games Night

Once again the CSSU is holding a Games Night!
It’ll be a night of PC/PS3/Xbox360/Wii gaming!
Help us out by bringing your consoles / computers if you can, either way anyone can come and have play!
Tournaments + prizes for everyone (in CS)!!!

We’ll have a required bag check for security + those with of you who don’t have anywhere to leave your stuff :D
facebook
CDF Boards

CSSU goes skating!

Join us!

Who: CS students and friends

What: Enjoy some ice skating, learn a bit along the way, meet new people!

Where: Nathan Phillips Square
— skate rentals are $8 (bring some sort of ID)

When: Friday February 12 starting at 6pm – 9pm
— last day of school before the beginning of Reading Week!!!

Why: Because it’s Canada; you have to go skating at least once
… and there will be FREE hot chocolate provided

Hope to see you all there!

VeloCity BootCamp

The University of Waterloo’s VeloCity program will take place this spring term (May – July)!
It involves selecting three great teams of post-secondary students from across Canada with promising tech startup ideas and putting them through the paces at VeloCity with the goal of getting their startup off the ground by the end of July.

Selected students would receive:
- funding – $3K per student $9K per team max…(provided by OCE / CCR)
- free office space in the Accelerator Centre in our R&T Park
- free living space at VeloCity (max 3 free rooms per team)
- Communitech (our local tech association) is developing weekly workshops and seminars, and as well they¹ll be helping to match the teams up through their network of mentors.
- Students would own 100% of their IP.

The application deadline is Feb 14 and more details are at http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/bootcamp

Project Showcase

A reminder has been posted of tomorrow’s Project Showcase on the Announcement board, along with a message from the career centre about the conflict with the Microsoft Tech Talk, and the fact that the Career Centre was able to schedule a special session of the talk for students who want to attend both events:
https://csc.cdf.toronto.edu/bb/YaBB.pl?num=1264099060

DemoCampUofT

Web Startup Society and Skule WebDev are looking for students who are willing to deliver a 5 minute demo on personal projects which focus on web and mobile applications/startups/websites @ our first DemoCampUofT to be held on the week of Feb 22 or Mar 1. It’ll be great chance to network, get instant feedback, and receive a certificate from the Web Startup Society and Skule WebDev.

For more info:
http://www.webstartupsociety.com/2010/01/democampuoft/

Learn how to unleash your Mac!

On February 11th from 4-6pm in BA 1130, Steve Hayman, Apple Consulting Engineer, is coming to campus to share his knowledge, expertise and humor!

Join Steve as he talks about software development on the Mac with Apple’s Xcode tool suite. We’ll look at building applications with Xcode and Interface Builder; the role of scripting languages including Applescript, Ruby and Python alongside C and Objective-C; reusing objects from Apple’s Cocoa, WebKit and ImageKit frameworks; nifty higher level tools including Automator for workflow design, and the groundbreaking Quartz Composer graphic development environment; and if Steve messes up, we may see some brief usage of the debugger as well.

Overview of some topics covered:
- The core UNIX operating system of the Mac
- The open-source tools used to build the operating system (the GNU C and C++ compilers, the BSD OS, etc)
- Simple programming by scripting other applications, e.g. writing scripts to tell, say, iChat or iTunes or Safari what to do
- Easy building-block style application development for non-programmers, power users etc using Automator and its 150 powerful actions
- The Xcode suite for building complete Mac OS X applications (the Xcode developer environment, the Interface Builder design tool, etc)
- Quartz Composer, a groundbreaking graphics development environment that lets you harness the power of the Mac OS X graphics technologies – Quartz 2D, Core Image, OpenGL, Quicktime, etc.
- Reusing pieces of Apple applications in your own application; e.g. using the WebKit frameworks that are the core of Safari to build your own applications that harness everything Safari can do, or the ImageKit framework (drawn from iPhoto) providing sophisticated objects for editing and presenting images
- Performance monitoring and analysis tools – what can you do with dtrace, Instruments.app, Shark.app and so on to peer inside your system and measure its behavior
- Using Xcode and the iPhone SDK to build applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Steve Hayman is a National Consulting Engineer for Apple’s Education Sales group. After graduating from Waterloo with an M.Math in 1986, he earned his hacker credentials as a Unix network manager for UW and Indiana University; at the latter institution he became the first, and perhaps the last, private individual in the entire state of Indiana to purchase a NeXT cube. Steve joined NeXT Computer in 1991, attracted by NeXT’s blend of a powerful Unix core with a great graphical interface. You can imagine his delight as Apple acquired NeXT and the NEXTSTEP operating system evolved into Mac OS X. A frequent speaker at Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference, he’s currently a field resource for Apple on the topics of Unix, the Mac OS X developer tools and the Cocoa, AppleScript Studio and WebObjects developer environments. In his spare time Steve directs Argonotes, the Toronto Argonauts Band, which he thinks is the finest band in the Canadian Football League.

Who Should Attend?
Mac users, software developers, faculty who teach programming and might be interested in using the Mac platform, anybody interested in the idea of writing their own applications, anybody interested in the guts of the operating system, UNIX aficionados who might be open-minded to doing the odd thing outside of the Terminal window once in a while, power Mac users who might be curious what you can do inside the Terminal window once in a while, and more.