New Member Guide

Hello, and welcome to the Computer Science Club! Thanks for joining. The office staff who signed you up should have told you about this stuff, but just as a refresher, here it is again.

Office

• Our office is MC 3036/3037 (we occupy both rooms) and we're across the hall (but distinct from) the Mathsoc office.

• Our club doesn't have weekly meetings or anything like that. If the door is open, we are open (even if it's 3 in the morning on Sunday). Feel free to drop in and say hi!

• The office closes when the last office staff leaves the room, and the office opens when somebody with a key comes by. If you're interested in becoming office staff, look out for the termly office staff training event or ask around the office.

• We have staplers by the door farthest from Mathsoc. Even if you're not a member, you're allowed to use them. You don't even have to ask (and in fact, we'd prefer if you didn't. Office regulars spend a good amount of time telling people that yes, they can use the staplers).

• We sell pop, chips, chocolate bars and other snacks. Prices are on the fridge door. Pay the red cup in the fridge.

Events

We hold a different set of events every term, but the same types of events come up again and again. Watch out for emails about:

• Industry tech talks. In the past, we've gotten folks from various tech companies to talk about algorithms, database design decisions and other things.

• UNIX 10X tutorials. Don't know how to use the commandline? Come out and learn with us. Know how to use the commandline? Come out and help us answer questions.

• Member talks. Do you have a burning desire to talk about AVL trees? No? Well, if you want to talk about a computer sciencey topic that's close to your heart, send an email to exec at csclub.uwaterloo.ca with a talk abstract (a paragraph we can put on a poster to describe your talk) and we'll see if we can make something happen.

• Code parties. We eat food, talk and write code. Code parties happen several times a term.

Machines

As a member of the club, you have access to our machines, both servers in the machine room down the hall and desktops in our physical office. Keep in mind that your username is your quest userid (e.g. j7smith) and your password starts out as the one you set when you joined the club for the first time.

• Your files are accessible on all of our machines

• Keep in mind that the machines are shared among all of our members. Play nice. For example, caffeine is our web server. You are strongly advised not to run long, intensive jobs on it. Something like that is a better fit for hfcs, corn-syrup or even possibly taurine.

• use SSH for access to the machines in the server room.
  • If you don't know how to use the commandline, you can wait for our approximately termly UNIX 101 event, google for "how to use the command line", or ask around the office.
  • if you happen to be using Windows, you can use an SSH client such as PuTTY[1].
  • If you have a Mac or you run Linux, you already have the ssh command installed. If your userid is j7smith and you want to use taurine, just open up a terminal window and type the following. You will be asked for your CSC password.

ssh j7smith@taurine.csclub.uwaterloo.ca

• Our office terminals are turned off, rebooted and otherwise reset somewhat frequently.

• If you forget your password, come by the office with your watcard and some other form of ID. Regular office staff can't reset your password for you, but if there's someone on our Systems Committee hanging around, they can do this for you.

• If you would like to change your password, log on to any of our machines and type kpasswd in a terminal. You will be prompted for your old password and be asked to type in your new password twice (just to make sure you didn't make a typo).

• We have a MySQL daemon running, but only on our web server caffeine. Check out this page if you would like a database.

• for technical questions (including package installation requests), send an email to our systems committee, syscom at csclub.uwaterloo.ca.

Web Hosting

You get web space with your CSC membership. Your website is visible at [2] (where j7smith is replaced with your own userid, of course).

• Files in the www directory inside your home directory (e.g. /users/j7smith/www) will appear on your web space.
• If you create a file called index.html and place it in www, it will appear at [3] instead of the directory listing that was there before.
• If the above information makes no sense to you, ask someone in the office for a gentler step-by-step introduction. Some day, there will be a guide like this on the wiki, but such a thing doesn't currently exist.

IRC

We have an IRC (internet relay chat) channel. Come hang out with us in #csc on freenode. If you are unfamiliar with IRC, you may want to read this guide.

Mail

• see the Mail page.
• The CSC gets a lot of requests to distribute Industry Opportunities to our members. We have a special opt-in mailing list for the people that want to hear about such things.
• We have a low-volume general mailing list which we use to send out information about upcoming events.

Library

There are books on the shelves lining the office. Feel free to drop by and read them.

Someone who knows more about the library checkout system than jy2wong should write something here.