A Warm Welcome, Earthlings,

It's Monday, it's the start of Week 4 and you can probably make an educated guess as to what this email contains. Did you guess events? If so, you'd be right!

We'll be starting off the week today (revolutionary, I know!) with our second competitive programming contest of the term! If you've been itching to try your hand at some more tricky problems, head on down to the Undergraduate Social Area from 7:30-9:30pm.

For Wednesday, we have something rather more relaxed planned — we'll be heading down to Taylors for a bite to eat! If you fancy a free lunch at our expense, come on down and join us from 1:30pm.

This Saturday sees a double whammy of events. From 5:30-6:30pm, we'll be popping down to Seminar Room 051 again for a specialised Learn to Code session on LaTeX! Afterwards, we'll adjourn to the Undergraduate Social Area from 7pm to engage in our second mini hackathon of the year.

I also share news of a non-CompSoc workshop this Saturday on contributing to FLOSS software by FLOSS @ Oxford — for more details, check out the And More... section below.

— Declan, CompSoc Secretary

Fun Computing Fact: Have you ever tried to run Windows 95/98 in a virtual machine on modern hardware? If you try it, you may find that they don't work! One reason for this is due to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB). All mainstream computers from the past few decades allow operating systems to map memory for processes through virtual memory. On x86 PCs, this is done through a page table, which is a data structure mapping memory address blocks called pages to physical memory locations.

Page table accesses can be slow, so x86 processors implement a cache to speed up the process! The translation lookaside buffer caches mappings from virtual memory addresses to physical memory addresses. This, however, comes with a caveat — on x86, the TLB must be invalidated after any changes to page table entries to prevent cache incoherency. Windows 95 and 98 do not do this correctly, a bug which has only been noticed in recent years with more modern hardware.

Still not a member? How?! Membership only costs £1 for LIFE, with tons of benefits - discounts on merch and tickets, free food at all socials, our exclusive Discord server and more - so it's definitely worth signing up!

or, go to https://ox.compsoc.net/product/lifetime-membership/

It's competitive programming Monday again and it's time to do... well, some competitive programming, duh. This Monday, we'll be down in the Undergraduate Social Area for our second contest of the term! If you fancy applying your new skills from our bootcamps or trying out a contest for the very first time, join us from 7:30-9:30pm for problems, pizza and intrigue!

When: 7:30-9:30pm, Monday 9^th February

Where: Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science 7 Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3QG

Click 'Going' here: https://fb.me/e/6JkRtPP0V

Last Wednesday, we indulged in some hot drinks — now it's time for a bite to eat! This Wednesday, we'll be popping down to Taylors together for a spot of lunch. If you fancy a free lunch funded by CompSoc, make sure to head on down and join us from 1:30-2:30pm!

When: 1:30-2:30pm, Wednesday 11^th January

Where: Taylors 31 St Giles', Oxford OX1 3LD

Click 'Going' here: https://fb.me/e/3wCgxuLgk

The only thing better than an academic paper is a pretty academic paper! This Saturday, prepare to toss out the horrors of Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer as we learn all about the LaTeX typesetting system! If you're working on an essay or a project report, make sure to come along to Seminar Room 051 from 5:30-6:30pm and learn how to make your documents look a whole lot fancier.

When: 5:30-6:30pm, Saturday 14^th February

Where: Seminar Room 051, Department of Computer Science 7 Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3QG

Click 'Going' here: https://fb.me/e/848A37z3v

After a successful pilot last term, it's time to leap into another mini hackathon! This Saturday, we'll be traversing down to the Undergraduate Social Area for an all-night social, where we'll be working on weird and wacky projects. Join us as we kick off from 7pm for a hackathon with a theme as yet to be announced...

If hackathons aren't your thing, we'll still be having our usual Saturday Social, with all the accoutrements you've come to expect! Come on down to join us with some free pizza and snacks and to ogle at the weirdos spending all night on entirely meaningless projects.

When: 7pm, Saturday 14^th February

Where: Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science 7 Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3QG

Click 'Going' here: https://fb.me/e/4gTolpQV9

An event being held by FLOSS @ Oxford:

Our workshop on contributing to free, libre and open source software projects (for example Zotero, Anki, Moodle, Thunderbird, VS Code or Codium, the Free Desktop such as Linux systems, and many more...), for programmers and non-programmers alike from all across Oxford is on Saturday 14 February, 14:00-16:00. CS department members can meet at the Bill Roscoe Lecture Theatre, and anyone from Oxford can meet at 7 Keble Road entrance; more information is here.

Earlier in the week there are related events organised by other people, like Digital Scholarship's first Open Source Initiative talk and coffee morning on Tuesday (for ox.ac.uk members only) and the monthly Tech Rescue repair café on Monday (requires prior booking).

When: 2-4pm, Saturday 14th February

Where: Bill Roscoe Lecture Theatre, Department of Computer Science, 7 Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3QG

Find out more here: https://ox.ogeer.org/event/contributhon

Make sure to join OxWoCS (Oxford Women in CS), a society we're working closely with, if you identify as a woman or woman-adjacent person in CS! They have a host of wonderful events on, including talks, panels and socials. Computer Science is unfortunately a subject with one of the biggest gender gaps in Oxford and worldwide, and addressing this is at the core of OxWoCS.

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