ACCU Oxford

The Oxford postcode area has more ACCU members than any other single postcode area. It seemed a pity to me that there was no local group, so a select group met for the inaugural meeting on 25/6/08.

Meetings are held on Wednesdays, usually (but not exclusively) the last Wednesday of the month. Oxford Computer Consultants generously allow us to use their meeting room. They're located in central Oxford, at 23-38 Hythe Bridge Street OX1 2EP, handy for the rail and bus stations and the Worcester Street car park.

Meeting start at 8pm and run until 9:30pm. After which we usually adjourn for a drink and post-meeting discussion.

ACCU Oxford now has its own mailing list. Subscribe via the web page.

To post to the list, email accu-oxford@accu.org. To keep spam volumes down, posts from non-members will be held for moderation.

The list is intended to be low volume, primarily for meeting announcements and other administrivia.

Wednesday 25th January, 8-9:30pm. Oxford Computer Consultants, 23-38 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford OX1 2EP

Sociality and Individuality, Richard Evans

The central theme of the talk is that interactive drama emerges when we place individual characters in social situations: drama = sociality + individuality. I will give a host of examples from my previous work: social situations and individuals in The Sims 3, Sim Philosopher, and Little Text People.

I will describe the architecture of the Little Text People simulator. The client is in HTML5+Javascript. The server is in Erlang/C/Praxis. Praxis is a high-level domain-specific language for modelling social practices.

Here are some screenshots of Little Text People and Sims 3.

Wednesday 29th February, 8-9:30pm. Oxford Computer Consultants, 23-38 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford OX1 2EP

An Evening of Lightning Talks, organised by Nigel Lester

A collection of talks, each lasting less than 10 minutes.

Wednesday 28th March, 8-9:30pm. Oxford Computer Consultants, 23-38 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford OX1 2EP

A Conference Talk Preview

A speaker at ACCU 2012 gets to practice their talk. Bring your rotten tomatoes!

Wednesday 2tth April - Saturday 28th April, Barcelo Hotel

ACCU 2012 conference

Wednesday 30th May, 8-9:30pm. Oxford Computer Consultants, 23-38 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford OX1 2EP

A Conference Retrospective

If you went to ACCU 2012, come and tell us about the sessions you liked. And if you weren't lucky enough to attend, come and hear the highlights of the conference.

There's now a public Google calendar listing upcoming meetings and other ACCU events or local events likely to be of interest to ACCU members. You can add it to your Google calendar with the '+' button at the bottom right hand corner.

30/11/11. Rob Bentall, Learning and Applying the Personal Software Process - Experiences from the life of an everyday software developer

26/10/11. Tom Dombrowsky, Multithreaded Programming and Asynchronous Patterns - A Love Story

22/6/11. An Evening of Lightning Talks organised by Nigel Lester.

You can download the slides for all the talks here.

25/5/11. Hazel Crofts, The Personal Software Process

27/4/11. Post-conference review.

30/3/11. Jim Hague, Distributed Version Control Systems - under the bonnet

2/3/11. Various, More fun with Android

14/7/10. Jim Hague, My First Android App

16/6/10. Rob Bentall, Chartered Status

5/5/10. Post-conference review.

2/12/09. Hubert Matthews, Continuous integration with Hudson

28/10/09. Nigel Lester, Coping with requirements

24/6/09. Derek Jones & Clive Pygott, Programming Language Vulnerabilities

27/5/09. Post-conference review.

25/3/09. Russel Winder. Fortran is not the only language for parallel computing.

28/1/09. Hubert Matthews. Unit testing legacy C code.

26/11/08. Phil Armstrong. Hindley Milner Datatypes and Haskell.

29/10/08. Open discussion. What are the qualities of a good software development manager, and why are there so few of them? And what do they think makes a good developer?

24/9/08. Pete Dillon, The Mainframe, and Cobol - when you need it, you really need it.

Technical problems prevented Pete showing some images of mainframe equipment of days of yore. This images are OldMainframePics.

30/7/08. Chris Jefferson, What's new in C++0x this week?

25/6/08. Jim Hague, Organising cross-platform code bases, and Phil Armstrong, Hindley Milner Datatypes: Bee's Knees or Mutt's Nutts?