The latest in our Lunchtime Lecture series is going to be from our very own Tom Robertshaw, talking about Netcraft and his experiences of the company.

Apologies for the late notice however, will include food of some desciption as always.

Sign up for the event now at BathStudent.com.

About Lunchtime Lectures

Why not do something constructive during your lunch time? Come along and listen to interesting talks for leading figures within the IT industry hosted by the BCSS. Bring your own food along or, if you’re a BCSS member, enjoy some free food.

Netcraft Profile

Netcraft is an Internet services company based in Bath, England. Netcraft is funded through retained profit and derives its revenue in the following ways:

• Providing internet security services, including anti-fraud and anti-phishing services, application testing, code reviews, and automated penetration testing.
• Providing research data and analysis on many aspects of the Internet. Netcraft has explored the Internet since 1995 and is a respected authority on the market share of web servers, operating systems, hosting providers, ISPs, encrypted transactions, electronic commerce, scripting languages and content technologies on the internet.
• Accepting advertising on the Netcraft web sites.

Netcraft has a cosmopolitan client list, spread through the UK, the USA, mainland Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America.

Clients include Aegon, British Telecom, Capita, John Lewis, Lloyds of London, Microsoft, Rackspace, and Securicor.

Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, and co-founder of 3com, pronounced Netcraft “cool”, while Tim O’Reilly called www.netcraft.com the best known example of a site devoted to tracking technology on the Internet.

This year the student’s union are improving the way that society elections are being held, allowing official society members to be nominated and vote in the elections, even if on placement or studying elsewhere, by allowing manifesto posting and vote casting all online.  As a Computer Science department, we thought it would be right to support this kind of a move and would like to call an AGM, a perfect opportunity for anyone interested in running for a post to ask us some questions.

As per the SU guidelines, this is how the next few weeks are going to look.

Annual General Meeting - TBC
Nomination Period - Monday 16th March until late on Sunday 22nd March
Voting Period - Monday 23rd March until Friday 27th March

Anyone interested in applying for a post can nominate themselves for a position during the Nomination Period.  There will probably be a need for a manifesto, so get thinking.  Everyone in the society will be eligible to cast their votes during the Voting Period.

Open Posts - Chair, Treasurer, Secretary

For any questions people may have, either keep them for the AGM so that everyone can get the answer, or send us an email and we’ll get back to you.

Social

There are plans for a social either before or after Easter.  Has anyone got any ideas?

Server

The BCSS, with Union funding, have purchased a server which we are currently getting up and running. It’s hosted in the department connected to the University network so can be accessed over SSH.  Currently we have CentOS installed with the plan to virtualise (run multiple OS’s) and then open them up for use. Firstly if anyone has any ideas about what they want to use it for, wants to run any training sessions or has any other suggestions then please get in contact. Also if anyone has any experience of server management then we would like you to be involved in the setup.

Feedback

We would be grateful of any feedback about the society so far this year. Have we been providing what you want, are the Lunchtime Lectures useful. It will help us and the incoming committee with the development plans for next year. If you haven’t been to any of our events are there any reasons why not?

March 3rd, 13:15 - 14:05, 1WN 3.11

The talk from Accenture will be based around improving your employability skills and making the most of your degree.  The person coming down will have a technical background this time meaning that we can actually ask some technical questions and really get an insight into what it would be like to work at Accenture from a technical point of view.

This would be a great chance to get some real interesting questions in about Accenture from a technical point of view.

The rough format of the lecture will be:

• Introduction
• What is Spam
• The politics of Spam filtering
• The technology of Spam and Spam filtering

As you will have heard, we would like to have another meet-up for some pre-Christmas drinks (carbonated or alcoholic or both or neither…). We wouldn’t like to drag away from Flirt’s popularity, so all I’ll say is, if you would like to go to Flirt, come see us for a bit of a warm up drink. If flirt isn’t your thing, but you fancy popping into town to have a moan about coursework or perhaps to forget it all, please come say hi for a bit longer .

See you soon.

Directions to the Hunstman.

Meri Williams from P&G is visiting to go through some of the projects that she has been on since graduating from Bath Computer Science in 2005.  She now works within Information and Decision Solutions and will give some tips on how to manage projects and people from her real world experiences.

Meri is also highly involved within recruitment at P & G. So if you are interested in summer or  year placements and want to find out more about what P & G do or ask a question about the intake process, this would be a fantastic opportunity that you will not want to miss.

If that wasn’t already enough of a reason to come along, P & G are kindly providing Domino’s pizza for all BCSS members.

Sign up for the event now at BathStudent.com.

About Lunchtime Lectures

Why not do something constructive during your lunch time? Come along and listen to interesting talks for leading figures within the IT industry hosted by the BCSS. Bring your own food along or, if you’re a BCSS member, enjoy some free food.

P&G Profile

Three billion times a day, P&G brands touch the lives of people around the world. This happens because P&G provides branded products of superior quality and value to improve the lives of the world’s consumers. This results in leadership sales, profits and value creation, allowing employees, shareholders and the communities in which P&G operate to prosper.

The Company markets more than 300 branded products. They have on-the-ground operations in more than 80 countries and employ nearly 140,000 people.

What began as a small, family-operated soap and candle company now provides products and services of superior quality and value to consumers in 180 countries.

Accenture will be coming along to discuss some interview and application tips and tricks relevant to students on placement and anyone interested in a job after University.  A question and answer session will be held at the end of the event for general questions and application specific questions for applying to a large organisation, such as Accenture.

We will be getting leaflets soon to pass out to you guys and around the department so that you can get a real feel for what Accenture will be talking about.

Sign up for the event now at BathStudent.com.

After the many requests, we have finally got around to organising a trip into town this Thursday evening for all those who fancy it. So come along and meet us in the Huntsman; members and non-members welcome.

See you there.

Prices are as follows:

Members: £8

Non-members: £10

Your ticket will include 2 games at Laser Quest and your train travel.  The travel assumes that you have a railcard - if you don’t then add 50p to your ticket price and we’ll sort it out.

We are going to be selling tickets outside the library at 1pm, Thursday 23rd, and 2pm, Friday 24th.

This event went down pretty well last year, I took 2 of my housemates with me, even though they weren’t BCSS members and had a pretty good laugh so don’t forget that we take non-members too.  On that note we can only take 30 people so make sure you get you and your friends signed up asap.

See you then!