If you don't know me, I am Andy, a 20 year old Computer Science undergraduate in an industrial year with Eli Lilly, a global pharmacetical. I have been involved in quite a few different extra curricular events in the Uni in previous years like presentations, workshops and programming class mentoring.

I'm going to try and introduce to you what Uni is all about, what's going on in Reading, my course and social life.

Firstly I have to say, make the most out of Uni. This really will be the best years of your life. Fresher's year is all about settling in to your course, and making new friends, so don't overwork in the first year.

As your are studying a technology subject, Reading is easily the best place in the UK if not in Europe to study and find a job close by after. You can expect quite a relatively high salary when (or hopefully when) you graduate, which will annoy all of your English/humanity  degree friends! 

For me, the first year was simply a preparation for the second, as that's when the real work started. You will know some modules in more detail than others, so your peer's knowledge in modules that you haven't studied before. Some lectures will really interest you, and some will not, but try to attend them all (you are paying for it after all) -- 9am's are the worst!

Try to also impress and make friends with lecturers, as just a discussion about a topic you are intersted in can inpire you on to greater things. Manju is always a great lecturer to have an algorithms-based natter to!

Unfortunately, I won't see most of you until you're in your 2nd year as I'm in an industrial year until next July, but I'll be blogging on here when I can.

And finally... in Uni you really discover who you are, and you'll meet alot of people who are also like you too. So be geeky with them!

Enjoy your time, Andy. 

The event will start in RH lecture theatre in the Physics building on Wednesday 12 Dec 07, and will begin from about 2pm.

The day will begin with brief introduction to the afternoon's events and an introduction to the world of open source.

After this, the floor will be opened up to anyone who want to talk about their own open source project, or another that they love, find interesting or different. There will be a few post-graduates talking the the group, and possibly a few staff members too. Ruben Arakelyan will be talking about Mozilla products and student competitions for a little while during this time too.

 After this, we'll all go to the labs for various activities including the Linux OS installation session, where you can come along with your laptop, and have a team of Linux geeks help install a version of Linux for you to try and work with. 

With this event come freebies. I have lots of Ubuntu CDs for 32 and 64 PCs for you to install at home, or give to a friend. We also have a big box of swag from Mozilla, including badges and stickers and other stuff. There maybe other stuff too...

I'd really like everyone to come to this free and open event, so invite your friends from halls or from other departments too - they're all welcome.

If you are coming, then please add your name to the Facebook event:

Facebook Event: Open Source Fest 2007 

edit: added date info 

 http://rdg.facebook.com/event.php?eid=22558720760&ref=mf

If you bring your laptop or desktop alng. a small group of Linux nutheads that will be able to sort out any problems you may have.

Ruben will also host a small talk on Mozilla, their plans, competitions and how you can get involved. Free Mozilla swag, t-shirts, stickers, hats, etc... 

 You should also invite your friends, people in your year and random people on the street -- everyone is welcome.

For the latest info, please check the Facebook event, as details may change a little.

Thanks a lot and Happy Hacking!
Andy Callaghan

 Frist things first, I'm about to enter my second year of uni, and I'm a bit nervous (again) as now, all the marks count toward my final degree. Argh!

Me and Ruben will repeat the Facebook API applications tutorial in the coming term, with a few changes to help things get off of the ground quicker, and bring more collobaration and user based aspects into application making. After reading Shirley 's post about to a Uni in the USA offering (better structured) Facebook classes, it gave me a few ideas which I will detail a bit later.

I will also hopefully be hosting a Linux install and intro session, so that newbies or even die hard MS peeps can come along get a distribution of Linux installed. I sent off for free Ubuntu 32 and 64bit DVDs -- they arrived a few days ago to my home address! If there is anyone reading this who knows enough about Linux to install it, could they comment or email me to become a helper for the session.

And lastly... the PHP. After learning C and C++ and having a basic understanding of php in my first year, I have developed my understanding of it over the summer by building an ecommerce/mulitmedia streaming/my space clone website for my sister's business.  It's not finished yet and I don't want to give anything away, but it is going pretty well at the moment!

Thanks for reading 

The major difficulty I have at the moment is that there is next to no help on t'internet about looking through a file for a string of characters.
At the moment, I have my program recognizing names, when to quit, and simple 'I like' statements, but nothing in the way of conversational files and responces, as it is just too difficult to implement in C++ - i have been trying for weeks now.

Any help anyone!?

I knew I had to use the isalpha() function to seperate the the alphabetic characters from the the other characters, so all that needed to be done was the structure of looping and file IO, which we had done in the previous lecture. 

All went swimmingly until my program wouldn't work; despite having no syntax errors, it wasn't working.

 It was only until i saw the post by Emma Guy of BB when i realised that when i was debugging the darn thing, MS was copying the binary into a different location to that with the in.txt, so nothing could be processed.

The first run of the program though Windows Explorer  proved a succes, it worked! Huzzah!

I then tested my program with a text file of just over 18 million characters (about 18 Mb), and worked through the lot in about 4 secs on my machine, which isnt too bad i guess.

I liked this practical as it was relatively straight forward and not confusing like some of the others had been, and also the submission through BB was nice as I could complete this assignment in my own time (ie at 3am).

And about the course... i found all of the course a great building block for what's going to come in the future. Some of the basics i thought could have been explained better, or have had more time to have gone through, like pointers, char manipulations and structs.

Although I come from a background where I have met Pascal, php, html, c++, JavaScript and others before, i still found this course a challenge, and interesting. The asignments help this.

 CS roadmap didn't help at all during any of the asignments, as none of the topics were relevant (even the pseudocode) - this would be alot better if this were to be changed for next year.

Sorry for the long post!
Thanks for reading!

Cheers
Andy C
www.microplop.com