Welcome to the website of the Trinity Hall Computer Society (THCS). We are the people who used to run and use hal.trinhall.cam.ac.uk; now we don't. Any college member may join the society, along with (at the Committee's discretion) other members of the University; please contact the secretary (or anyone else on the committee) if you wish to join.
Following on from last year's EGM (Minutes) we need to hold a further meeting in the near future to discuss the future of the Trinity Hall Computer Society (THCS).
The principle points for discussion are:
The Computer Society has grown vigorously this year, in part due to the roles played by animation experts Static and James. The two of them handed over the artistic reigns of the society to Matthew Garrett and Eric Penguine. A direct result of this fresh blood in the leadership team has been a splendid increase in the membership of the society since the start of the year. Edward Allcutt remains chief animation editor and has worked tirelessly, often for days at a time, in his role.
In early March, after a fascinating talk on the dangers of key-logging by Jeff Cider (an expert in insecure software design), a small group of the membership embarked on two exciting new projects, "Moose" and "Fish," which hopefully will come to fruition by the end of the year and be as successful as halbook, the societies first major project for the college.
Halbook is the online system to book formal hall (and, until its demise, super hall) places for both students and guests. It has been enhanced this year to work in increasingly diverse circumstances by current president, Malcolm Scott.
The student-run webserver (hal) is supporting a growing army of websites both by students and societies and thanks to donations has been upgraded to a more recent hardware platform and after discussion about flexibility at the AGM, it was decided that instead of root on RAID, root on JE4D was the natural platform for it.
Subsequent to the upgrade of hal, Neill Smith donated a special computer to THCS called fire. This has led to claims of computers being on fire and, in one rare case, pizza on fire although fire in the attic remains the most common state reported. Fortunately none of this has led to any serious problems, including fire.
Our thanks to Adam Biltcliffe, the outgoing publicity officer and Beead Orlcut, the former president. We remain indebted to Eric Marcus and Rob Bricheno of the Trinity Hall IT Department for being so supportive of the society, which has gone from strength to strength and this year promises to be another excellent one.
Stuart Rowan (THCS publicity officer 2005-2006)
The society was founded at the start of Michaelmas 2002 with the objectives of making computing more accessible to students of Trinity Hall. It also provides a forum for people interested in Computers to extend and explore that interest. We have doubled our membership since last year and have boosted the number of non-Computer Scientists in the society. It looks like the Publicity Officer has done a great job.
The society currently has three computers for members to access. The society looks after the student-run webserver (http://hal.trinhall.cam.ac.uk), which hosts some of the other societies' pages such as the Chapel's pages, RAG and the Ents website. The most popular service on hal is halbook.
Halbook manages all Undergraduate formal and super hall bookings (using a web page), which has made selecting and booking formal halls easy. This is a service designed, from scratch, and maintained by society members for the benefit of everyone.
The society has also had some social events (Pub meets and a curry) this year which give members a chance to relax away from their computers and/or discuss computer issues with friends who've had greater experience.
At the AGM, the outgoing committee handed over the reigns to the new one and a few amendments to the constitution were proposed and accepted. We're still hoping Barclays will eventually be able to provide us with a bank account and are also looking to expand/upgrade the main student server, hal.
Stuart Rowan (President, 2003-4)
The consitution is available, along with a changelog.
We run an IRC channel for THCS and general Trinity Hall chat; you'll almost certainly find a number of us on there. Server: irc.srcf.ucam.org; channel: #thcs. (IRC server kindly provided by the Student-Run Computing Facility.)
Committee Members: