User:Grahame/S
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Image:Ucc-sun-logo-black.png |
|
| Motto | |
|---|---|
| Established | 1974 |
| President | James French |
| Vice President | Luke Williams |
| Patron | |
| President Emeritus | David Adam |
| Vice President Emeritus | James French |
| Patron Emeritus | |
| Location | Cameron Hall, Crawley Campus, UWA |
The University Computer Club (UCC) is a Guild affiliated club at The University of Western Australia. It was founded in 1974[1] and recently celebrated its thirty-second birthday, making it one of the oldest student-run computing societies in the world (including the famous Homebrew Computer Club.
The first computer purchased by the club was an Alpha Micro AM100 named Murphy, but before that time the club was pooling its resources to gain time on the University's PDP-6. Murphy has kept in storage for many years, and now current and past members are hoping to restore the machine.
Most UCC activities take place in the club room. The room is located in Cameron Hall on UWA's Crawley Campus, and is open most days and weekends into the late evening. Popular activities are programming, study avoidance, electronics and various types of gaming.
Contents |
[edit] Achievements and Awards
In 1980 the UCC won an award from the Silver Jubilee Trust for Young Australians[1]. The award reads:
- Award for 1980 presented to University Computer Club for the purpose of providing students with access to practical experience in computer use and management, promoting community understanding of computer benefits, and providing computer services to service groups who could not otherwise afford them.
In 1992, when members brought the UCC Coke machine online, it was only the second operational vending machine on the Internet[1], after the one at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 1999 UCC was awarded the Guild's Best Club Award[2].
UCC members were heavily involved in the organisation of linux.conf.au in 2003. Several members are well-known contributors to open source projects, including GNOME, Monotone, Debian, Dropbear, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Squid and Avahi.
In 2007, The UCC was Certified by Wikipedia's Jimbo Wales as "Officially Notable"[3]
[edit] Club Organisation
The club has an organising committee comprising a President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Secretary, Fresher Rep and three Ordinary Committee Members[4]. In addition to the official committee, several ad-hoc groups exist. Door group members are able to open the club door, and are responsible for looking after the room. Coke group members can administer the coke system. Wheel group members look after the servers, desktop machines and network[5].
[edit] Notable projects
UCC members have produced some remarkable hacks. Some of the most egregious are documented below.
[edit] Computer automation
The UCC door, snack machine and Coke machine are all computer controlled. A central system dispense provides an electronic credit system.
The snack machine runs custom firmware that turns it into a serial console, controlled by server software running on a Linux machine. Club members log in on the keypad of the snack machine with their UNIX numeric user ID, and a PIN. Once logged in snacks can be vended, drinks can be dispensed from the coke machine, and the clubroom door can be opened.
Drinks can be dispensed over the World-Wide-Web, from a terminal or from the keypad of the snack machine.
The electronic door latch is driven by an old modem; ATH1 is sent to open the door. The door sensors were handled by a "black box" RS-232 switch, this eventually broke, so now we are using a DEC serial terminal server to probe the door sensors and report their presence over Jabber.
[edit] Machine Room
One weekend in 1996, club members built themselves a machine room. It provides a small, insulated area in which to securely host servers. It is air-conditioned in order to cope with Australian summers. The club servers centrally authenticate via LDAP, and allow club members access to many operating systems. These include Solaris, Tru64, Linux, Mac OS X and BSD.
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b c Hawkes, Dr. E: UCC History Project
- ^ The University Computer Club: Timeline
- ^ See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmGmePKBteo
- ^ The University Computer Club: Constitution
- ^ The University Computer Club: Groups
[edit] External links
[edit] See also
- UniSFA - The University Science Fiction Association, UCC's sister club.
- Image:UCC_clubroom_panorama_20060126.jpg - 360° panorama of the clubroom.
