Mitchell Altman, one of the pioneers of Virtual Reality technology, is flying in tonight to give a talk to Netsoc! This is a major international speaker who’s coming from Roboexotica in Vienna and heading to the 23rd Chaos Communication Club, so we’ve been lucky to grab him. The talk will be at 5pm tomorrow, Thursday the 11th in the Lloyd Institute.

The talk will focus on some philosophical aspects of the technology, such as how it applies to the modern world, an example being Second Life and other virtual environments. It’s guaranteed to be interesting, and won’t have a very techie focus, so do come along! There’ll be the traditional speakers’ night out afterwards, to which everyone is welcome. Hope to see you there!

• Time: 5pm, Thursday 11 December
• Place: LB01, Lloyd Institute

As the first term draws to a close, Netsoc is going to be hosting something shiny! This week we have a Ruby tutorial. The tutorial will cover some Ruby basics before showing off some of the cool meta-programming tricks possible with Ruby that make it so powerful.

There’s been a rumour going that Ruby is quite easy to pick up for beginners (powerful, object oriented, great light syntax) and really useful for the more experienced. Well, we know for a fact that this rumour is true and got around this fast because it was written in Ruby.

• Time: 7pm, Tuesday 2nd December
• Place: Beckett Labs, Arts Block