UD ACM Minutes

3/4/08 Minutes

Paul Fenlon — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:13:00 +0000

Officers introduced themselves and began the meeting around 7:05pm.
Andy O., Matt Rein, and Tara Strobel from Vanguard began talk about Waterfall and Agile.

Waterfall

Four phases – inception, elaboration, construction, and transition.
Workflows – planning, requirements, analysis, design, implementation, testing, and elevation.
Discussed advantages and disadvantages of Waterfall.

Agile

Started by a group of software developers to improve software engineering.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
Scrum board and Scrum master.
XP – Extreme programming

Meeting concluded at about 8:15pm.

UD ACM Meeting - 11/27/2007

Paul Fenlon — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 06:23:00 +0000

Meeting started at 7:35pm with a short introduction by Mike Shertok.

Lori Pollock started by talking about the importance of independent studies, studying abroad, undergraduate research, and internships.

Study Abroad

Lori talked about the CIS study abroad trip this summer to London, England. The courses being offered are software engineering based are 300 level classes. The only prerequisite for going on the trip is CISC-220.

Independent Study

Independent studies are 1-3 credit courses that involve an individual and a faculty member. They fulfill tech elective or concentration requirements.

How to find an independent study: scan websites, talk to other students, express interest to faculty member, interview, summer or academic semester.

Undergraduate Research

Involves working on a project with PhD students and a faculty member. Very open-ended , creative, experimental, etc. The earlier undergraduate research is done the better - sophomore summer. Researchers can either be paid, earn credits, or just volunteer. The more years involved in research the better for graduate school and/or job applications.

How to participate in research: same as independent study.

Internships

Spend a summer at a company for about 10-12 weeks either locally or some remote place. Internships usually involve research and development, software, hardware, communications, non-computing, and beyond. Internships don't earn students credit but often pay very well. They are very import for making contacts for jobs and reference letters and they help students learn what the industry is like.

Make sure to go to UD Career Services and get help with resumes, cover letters, interview skills, etc.

How to get an internship: apply in December, January, or February for a summer internship.

About an internship for Arctic Supercomputing Center in Alaska...

"That sounds like a really cool internship." - Phill Conrad

UD ACM Minutes for 9/25/2007

Paul Fenlon — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:45:00 +0000

ACM with Guest Quantum Leap

Officers present (at least for a little while): Chip, Mike, Steve, Paul, Ben

Professors present: Dr. Conrad, Dr. Saunders

Steve introduced Quantum Leap (QL) as a whole at 8:05pm.

Joseph Elad (CEO) gave overview of QL

Touched on some fields of technology and business implemented by QL
Went over flow chart of QL areas of research and development
Brought up idea of touring QL because it is so radical

Dave Cleaver spoke about future combat systems

Situational awareness
Pro-active decision support
Intelligent sensor platform
Demonstrator features
Hermes: Agent-oriented Surface-oriented Architecture
Showed demo videos of map interactions with enemies, etc.

Joseph Elad concluded the QL talk by touching on the fact that QL is not out to kill people and is in fact using its technologies for good things other than war.

Food at 8:55pm. Yum.

UD ACM Minutes for 9/11/2007

Paul Fenlon — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:35:00 +0000

The meeting got started around 7:35pm
Officers Present:

Paul Fenlon
Andrew Chepurney
Stephen Mahoney
Michael Shertok
Ben Karel

12 Students in attendance (including officers)
1 Professor: Dr. Phill Conrad
Mike and Steve started off with a general welcome speech and then broke into some news topics:

Hp Thermal Inkjet Technology Put to Medical Use
NAB Takes Fight Against "whitespace" Broadband to the Airwaves
Microsoft Releases Fixes for Just Four Flaws
IBM Throws Weight Behind OpenOffice.org Project
Sony Debuts Rolly MP3 Player
Guitar Hero III
Apple A Day - Rent Movies on iTunes
Online Sleuths Use Google to Find Pilot
NTP Files Patent Suits Against AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint

Talked about some random things for a while:

Oprah and Barak Obama
Rat Brain Controlling Flight Simulator and Drones

Mike spoke for a while about the new CISC study abroad program and the recent trip to Switzerland:

First ever study abroad
CERN
Possible study abroad in London coming up

Discussed the semester agenda:

Quantum Leap
Xbox Tourney
Rasmussen -- Robotics
Visit to HostMySite.com data center
Vanguard presentation
Concentration night
How-to nights
LLC, web business start up discussion

Concluded with everyone introducing themselves, their college status, and classes being taken

UD ACM Minutes for 3-7-2007

Chip — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 01:36:00 +0000

Steve has introduced his boss, Vess Bakalov, who works at SEVONE and is in charge Network Design and gave a presentation. It is as follows...

Of necessary Evil
- IT has traditionally been viewed as a cost center across non-IT companies
- Challenges justifying investment in IT
Unclear Benefits
Too much Hype
Too many late projects
- Challenges managing the IT department
Quantifying objectives
Process design
t3chn0-sp33k

Along came the network
- Networks emerged as the single most important driving force behind the wide adoption of computers both at home and in businesses.
-Since the early 90's, more and more applications have migrated to the network.
- The Network has grown into one of the most important assets of companies of all sizes.

Commoditization
- What is commoditization?
- When can something be called a commodity?
- Is the commoditization of IT good for business?

How do commodities compete?
- Driving up availability while simultaneously driving down the unit cost.

The Network as a Utility
- If IT is becoming a commodity, then the infrastructure is becoming a utility.
- The role of management is to achieve that utility-like status.
Automating basic tasks
Enable more "strategic" tasks
Planning
Optimization
Increasing Alignment with the business unit
- This means both technical as well as human behavior modification.

Your New Phone
- VoIP: How the network is replacing your phone
Why will it?
Adoption of VoIP has skyrocketed in modern enterprises (25% have it, and 75% expect to have it within 3 years).
Cost savings and exciting application are driving the deployment.
Why it hasn't yet?
Poor Planning.
Poor Budgeting.
Poor Interoperability.

What do we need to get there?
- Process, Process, Process!
- Manage.
Fault
Performance
Configuration
Security
Accountability

A Network as an Employee
- The network does a lot of work in your enterprise
- The same rigor that is used to measure the performance of an employee should be used to measure the performance of the network.
Throughput
Latency
Jitter
Outages

Agility
- Agility is about managing change
- Change comes in many forms
Market pressures
Competitive pressures
Technological pressures
Natural disasters
Etc.
-Managing changes requires quick communication and informed decision making.

What is an Agile Organization?
- An organization that can respond in a real-time-enough fashion to situations that impact the health and well-being of teh organization and its stakeholders.
Wal-Mart
U of Flordia
Department of Homeland Security

Becoming Agile
- Becoming Agile is about Becoming
Proactive
Predict and be ready for change
-Reactive
The best laid plans do not survive the first bullet
- Comprehensive
- In Depth

FYI
- The Innovation Gap was defined to be the difference between the Importance of Innovation and the Amount of Innovation.
- The six areas of IT with the greatest innovation gap were:
Security (35%)
Performance Management (32%)
Management other than performance management (29%)
WAN Services (25%)
Data Center (20%)
Converged Applications
____________________________________________________________________

For next week...
Xbox Tourney!!! 4 rooms and 4 projectors!!!

UDACM Minutes for 2/28/07

Chip — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:52:00 +0000

2/28/07

First meeting of 2007.

A hot new animation provided by Van Lang was presented at the beginning of the meeting. There was an OK turnout, approximately 15 people, including Dr. Saunders.

Joint venture between UPE and ACM

UPE is Computer Science Honor society, created last spring. Dr. Saunders is the advisor and the group is in its infancy with only 5 members. $50 admission for a lifetime membership. Tangible advantages: official 1 year membership with ACM and something valuable to list on your resume. 3.25 GPA requirement. Comp Sci majors only and you need 64 credits with MATH210 being a part of the total. A treasurer is needed! Visit http://udel.edu/stu-org/upe (locally) or www.acm.org/upe (nationally) or write questions to frank@udel.edu.

Weekly News

Apple TV

The realease was delayed till march. $300 with the ability to stream any HD AV to any TV wirelessly from any computer running iTunes.

Sony in the lead with Blu-ray over Toshiba

New $600 player which is much cheaper
In competition with PS3

Dell to start selling Linux-Powered machines!

Working with Novell so it allows users to chose which version
However, Dell backpedaled by saying, “It’s just a thought.”
You can however, with enough yelling over the phone with Dell, they will ship you a machine without an OS.

China has laws against ‘Internet Addiction’

One man has had his life plotted out in jail where he will NOT come into contact with the Internet until he is 84 years old.

WordPerfect Lightning Beta Available

Free beta to encourage people to branch away from Microsoft’s Office Suites

AMD integrates ATI Graphics

Energy efficient and can support up to 4 monitors!
Designed for the demanding graphics needs of Windows Vista.

Fat Gamer passes from playing too much MMO

Over Chinese new year, a man dies from gaming too hard

Google Maps now adds real-time traffic data

Interesting to note that Yahoo has had this for quite some time, but is still a great advancement.

34% people use wireless that are connected to the internet

40% of people have connection to the Internet

Firefox 3.0 makes lead in for Web based Apps
RIAA Announces New Campus Lawsuit Strategy

Encourages the individual law suites to students offering an ultimatum to them and makes them pay harsher fines.

BitFast, sorts linked lists 10 times faster than mergesort.

Rumored to simply just be a variation on Radix Sort

Dr. Conrad talked about how he used VoIP 20 years before the World Wide Web was created. Talked about book called TCP Illustrated, this book goes into great detail on socket programming. He explained this book in context on how he did VoIP programming over a UDP network protocol.

Steve talks about The Code Book. This book goes into cryptography and explains how Europe had computers way before the US did. We just had the first ‘publicly used’ machine.

The Last Question, a story about a computer that can answer nearly any question. When it can’t, it says it doesn’t have enough data. Mind blowing ending!

Next week…

- Presentation on Network Management from Steve Mahoney’s boss.

o Eventually, there will be a field trip to Steve’s place of work to see this content hands-on. Possibly, sometime after spring break

Before Spring Break…

- Second Xbox tourney

o Using multiple rooms

o More organized this time

o Up to 16 players per game!

- Using the new Student Media Center

o Dr. Conrad has great influence in this area in renting the rooms for 2 hour periods.

§ Some controversy about the staff limiting the use of the services.

§ Steve Mahoney gave a detailed layout of the new basement in the library.