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Wednesday 26 October 2005
Formal Hall

Your fantastic social secretary cordially invites to the next fabulous JCN social event, which all the freshers must turn up to as I know you'll enjoy it if you do!
Contact jcn-party-animal@jesus.cam.ac.uk if you can't get your own ticket.
Wednesday 26th, meet at 7pm in the college bar.

Tuesday 18 October 2005
Talk: An introduction to JCN and Zeus

Find out about JCN, the College computing society, what they can do for you, and what you can do for them! Get help with computer problems, build your own websites, become a sysadmin on a student server, and join us for a drink afterwards.
7:30pm
Library Court, Staircase 1, room 10 (Seminar Room)

Monday 10 October 2005
Freshers Squash

Come along to our JCN squash to meet new and old members alike.
All welcome, nefarious schemings appreciated...
Drinks and nibbles will be provided :)
7pm, 48 Jesus Lane (pretty much opposite college), room 2. Buzzer marked 'Tom'.

Thursday 24 February 2005
Introduction to LaTeX

Writing an essay or dissertation? Want to make it look more professional? Then come along and find out about the LaTeX typesetting language, used by the majority of technical books and journals. The talk will cover reasons for using LaTeX, how to use it on your own computer, and a tutorial to the basics of the language. Thursday 24th February, 8.15pm, 1 LC 10 (Seminar Room). All Welcome!

Friday 4 February 2005
Introduction to HTML

Interested in writing web pages? Join us for our Introduction to HTML talk on Friday 4th February 2005, at 8.15pm in the Library Court Seminar Room (1 Library Court, Room 10.

Tuesday 28 December 2004

From JNet:

All power to internal College buildings will be switched off at 8.00 am on Tuesday 28 December to enable the connection of a new mains electrical supply. This will result in all lighting, heating, telephones and IT systems being turned off for at least 24 hours.

It is hoped that the JCSU/JCN servers will be able to be turned back sometime on Wednesday 29th December.

Friday 10 December 2004
Christmas Party

Party with the tenuous excuse of rapidly approaching Christian festivities.
Time: Probably all night.
Place: 48JL.
Mince pies, drinks and plans for world domination: Compulsory.
Entertainment will be provided by our glorious leader.

Monday 15 November 2004
Installfest

Bring your PC along and install Linux (or indeed any other unix-like OS), or just come along and learn more about installing Linux onto computers. Starts at 7.30pm in the new party room.

Monday 8 November 2004
'Introduction to Linux' talk with Sean Furey

The first JCN talk of this year is the 'Introduction to Linux' presentation. If you have wondered about computing beyond Microsoft Windows, want to delve deeper into the realms of computing technology, or just fancy trying something new - then this presentation gives an insight into what the Linux world is like.

Apart from developing Linux, the open source world caters for Windows users also - Mozilla Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org) being recently highlighted by the worldwide press. This talk will also touch on some of the other goodies available from the open source world.

The presentation is on Monday 8th November, at 9.00pm, in the party room and will last around 45 minutes.

Tuesday 9 March 2004
Richard Clayton on the Amstrad CPC464

At 7.30pm in Library Court Staircase 1, Room 10, Richard Clayton from the Computer Laboratory will speak on the Amstrad CPC464. Map of college here.

Back in the mists of time 32K of ROM and 64K of RAM was more than any gamer could want. Having your home computer turn up complete with colour monitor and built-in cassette deck was the height of plug-and-play luxury. The Amstrad CPC 464 delivered all of this and more. Richard Clayton co-founded Locomotive Software in 1983 and, exactly twenty years ago was recovering from a hectic four months developing the firmware and BASIC for "Arnold". But that was back before products like the Amstrad PCW machines, BASIC2 for Gem and, later still, "Turnpike" made Locomotive into a household name (in several million households, if you read the copyright screen carefully). Richard will be talking about what software development was like before hard disks and how one addresses the challenge of building a world-class product in a timescale measured in weeks.

Thursday 12 February 2004
Installfest

Bring your PC along and let our experts install linux (or any other unix-like OS) on it. Or just come along and watch! 8pm, Room 10 (Seminar Room), Staircase I, Library Court.

Tuesday 3 February 2004
An Introduction to Linux

This talk will explain what the Linux operating system is, why you might want to use it and how to get started. Some of Linux's most useful tools will also be introduced. Ross Church, 7.30pm, Room 10 (Seminar Room), Staircase I, Library Court.

Monday 26 January 2004
Basic Web Design - A Beginner's Guide to Creating a Website

Ever wanted to know how to create your own website and publish it on the College student-run webserver? Come along to Room 10 Library Court Staircase 1 at 7.30pm on Monday 26th January, and let Ben Benfold explain all!

Monday 19 January 2004
Advanced Web Design with PHP

Kyle Maddison, 7.30pm, Room 10 (Seminar Room), Staircase I, Library Court.

Thursday 6 March 2003
Seminar - Programming Networked Applications the UNIX Way

Dr David Ingram, 7:30pm, Room 10 (Seminar Room), Staircase I, Library Court. Modern systems are full of programs which need to send messages to each other, for example desktop environments, multiplayer games, distributed compute servers, status monitors, chat utilities etc. You can traditionally do this sort of thing either by grokking a thousand-page CORBA manual or by using the BSD Socket API and developing everything from the ground up. In this talk I will describe "SCOP", which is a simple, complete, efficient and well documented library for message passing, events and RPC's. It is also one of my open source software projects, hosted on the SRCF.

Monday 24 February 2003
Installfest

7:30pm, Room 10 (Seminar Room), Staircase I, Library Court. Bring your PC along and our experts will install Linux on it for you! Alternatively, come along and watch the initial install of New Zeus.

Monday 17 February 2003
Seminar - Quantum Computing for non-Physicists

Jonathan Keeling, 7:30pm, Room 10 (Seminar Room), Staircase I, Library Court. Quantum Computing (and the more general field of Quantum Information Theory) make use of some of the stranger predictions of quantum mechanics in order to provide new ways of performing computation with the possibility of huge speed advantages over classical computers.

In this talk I will introduce the general ideas involved in building a quantum computer, discuss a quantum algorithm (Shors algorithm for finding prime factors in polynomial time). I will then talk about some current ideas for implementing quantum computers, and the problems and limitations these face. A large selection of references to online articles, tutorials and news about quantum computing including current research in Cambridge can be found here.

Thursday 13 February 2003
Seminar - Using UNIX-based Operating Systems: A Beginner's Guide

Nathan Dimmock, 7:30pm, Room 10 (Seminar Room), Staircase I, Library Court. The powerful capabilities of UNIX-based operating systems means they are often prevalent in academic departments but conversely have a steep initial learning curve for those unfamiliar with them. This talk will present an overview of why you might want or need to use a UNIX-based operating system (such as Linux, BSD and Solaris) and a guide as to how to get started.

Monday 3 February 2003
Computing and Democracy: One Reason JCN matters

Martin Keegan, 7:30pm, Room 10 (Seminar Room), Staircase I, Library Court. The talk will look at the history of JCN (and to a lesser extent its bastard offspring the SRCF) from the perspective of JCN as an alternative provider of services which have become essential to some undertakings such as student society websites. JCN/SRCF will be used as a familiar pair of examples to look more broadly at the question of the importance of digital networks in people's day-to-day lives and the basis, democratic or otherwise, on which they are run.

Monday 1 April 2002
New JCN Service!

Ross Church identifies an important service that JCN is not currently offering and suggests a way to rectify this using recent JCN hardware acquisitions.

Monday 18 February 2002
Seminar: Digital Divides and the Ignorance Economy

Martin Keegan explains why computing isn't giving us what we want.

Monday 25 February 2002
Seminar: Lisp and Linux - Making SPARCs fly!

Christophe Rhodes, the College's Lisp guru, talks about porting Lisp to SPARC Linux and some of the challenges involved.

Tuesday 12 March 2002
Seminar: How to avoid going to gaol for crimes committed by your computer

Nathan Dimmock explains that while, "it wasn't me" might work for Shaggy, the government seem to have taken a few of Alisha's Attic's lyrics to heart.

Monday 5 November 2001
Seminar - Parallel Computing

8:45, Room 10 (seminar room), Staircase I, Library Court. A look at the basic ideas behind parallel computing and how it can be used. Includes how to decide whether parallel processing is appropriate for a job, and some of the technical problems with implementing it.

Saturday 16 June 2001
JCN Annual General Meeting

1:30, Room 10 (seminar room), Staircase I, Library Court. Come and hear what's happened this year, make suggestions for the year to come, and vote in the new committee. If you are interested in being on the committee next year, you can email the current committee members for more details.

Monday 6 November 2000
JCN Squash

8:30pm-10:30pm, Room 10 (seminar room), Staircase I, Library Court. Come along, eat, drink and help us plot to take over the world! (and find out about the other things we do!)

Monday 16 October 2000
Seminar - SGML: What is it?

JCN presents an introductory seminar on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), XML (Extensible Markup Language) and DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language) at 7:30pm, Room 10 (seminar room), Staircase I, Library Court.

Saturday 15 July 2000
JCN buys a new computer!

athena.jesus.cam.ac.uk, an Intel Celeron 533 with 128Mb of RAM is available on nem-net.

Wednesday 21 June 2000
An Introduction To Linux/UNIX

The second in the JCN Seminar series will take place at 10:30am, The Kwok-Room, Jesus College. For more information, e-mail jcn-seminars@jesus.cam.ac.uk.

Friday 16 June 2000
AGM

Annual General Meeting to be held at 2pm in room A5, Jesus College. Nominations for committee posts welcome. For more information, contact the Secretary.

Friday 14 January 2000

JCN gets its own server, hephaestus (shortly to be renamed to poseidon). It's on nem-net, so feel free to use it. The admins can be contacted at jcn-poseidon-admin@jesus.cam.ac.uk.

Thursday 25 November 1999

The first ever JCN seminar will take place in the Kwok Room at 7:30pm on this Thursday (the 25th November). Jock Busuttil, webmaster of CUSU, Red and Blackmail, and SRCF will give a talk on HTML for beginners. All are welcome to come.

Thursday 21 October 1999

The JCN squash will be held on Thursday the 21st of October, from 7pm in the Alcock room (up the steps from Hall). Refreshments will be provided. Please come and bring anyone who would be interested.

Saturday 2 October 1999

NIS cluster expands to swallow up 500Mhz dual Celeron beast.

Wednesday 1 September 1999

MkBD rewritten (port? what does that mean?) for GGI

Tuesday 27 July 1999

College approves JCN's Kwok Linux project.

Monday 31 May 1999

New email terminal (aphrodite) installed in Marshall room.

Thursday 18 February 1999

A short summary of the Open Projects Meeting held tonight can be found here.

Saturday 13 February 1999

There will be a Members' Forum in the Societies' Room on Thursday 18th February from 18:30 until about 20:00. Please come along - this is your chance to influence JCN's future. Squash and biscuits will be provided...

Wednesday 27 January 1999

Instructions for using the Jesus Parallel Virtual machine are now up.