October's BCS OSSG/OSHUG 19/10/2017

[Sevan Janiyan <venture37%geeklan.co.uk@localhost>]

Hello,
There's a OSSG/OSHUG meeting later this month at the BCS. I will be
giving an update on NetBSD following on from the workshops which have
run over the past few moths this year alongside two other talks (see below)

The event is free and open to all but registration is required
https://events.bcs.org/book/2717/

Reimagining EDSAC: The ChipHack experience
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Speaker: Mary Bennett

ChipHack is an occasional 2 day workshop introducing students and
hobbyists to FPGA design. This year, ChipHack was sponsored by the BCS
OSSG and Computer Conservation Society. To celebrate the 60th
anniversary of the BCS, the workshop was extended by half a day and
attempted to reimagine one of the earliest valve computers, EDSAC,
designed by the BCS' founding president, Prof Sir Maurice Wilkes. The
workshop used the open source MyStorm board (created by OSHUG members
Al Wood and Ken Boak) and the YoSys open source FPGA tool chain
created by Clifford Wolf.

Mary led the team putting together the technical content of the
workshop. She will report back on what was achieved, from the three
implementations of the computer, to the diverse reimagining of the
original peripherals. The result is a legacy of lectures and videos,
to allow anyone to run their own ChipHack course.

Mary Bennett is an undergraduate in Electronics at Surrey University.
She is currently a UKESF scholar working at Embecosm for the academic
year 2017/18, where she specializes in automated generation of
simulators and low level tool chain utilities from formal architecture
descriptions.

Updates to the NetBSD operating system since OSHUG #57 & #58
------------------------------------------------------------

Speaker: Sevan Janiyan

Since the workshops held earlier this year, numerous changes have been
made to the NetBSD operating system to ensure future workshops are
easier for users and work smoother from the outset. This talk will cover
some of the improvements made so far and what's currently in the works.
- From wrestling with the u-boot firmware to new tools included in the os
and much more.

Sevan Janiyan is founder of Venture 37, which provides system
administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems and
computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he
maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems
featuring PowerPC, SPARC and armv7l CPUs. He hopes to own a NeXTcube &
OMRON LUNA-88K2 one day.

The Interplay between Semantic Coupling and Co-Change of software classes
------------------------------------------------------------------

Speaker: Dr Andrea Capiluppi

During maintenance, developers must ensure that related entities are
updated to be consistent with these changes.
Studies in the static change impact analysis domain have identified that
a combination of source code and lexical information outperforms using
each one when adopted independently.
The presentation has two aims: first, to compare the effectiveness of
measuring semantic coupling of OO software classes using (i) simple
identifier based techniques and (ii) the word corpora of the entire
classes in a software system. Second, to empirically investigate the
interplay between semantic and change coupling.

Dr Andrea Capiluppi joined the Department of Computer Science at Brunel
University London (UK), as a Lecturer in Software Development in May
2012. Between 2009 and 2012 he was at University of East London, working
as a Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering. Before that, he worked as
a Senior Lecturer and at University of Lincoln between 2006 and 2009.
Andrea's research and teaching interests focus on Software Evolution and
Maintenance, as well as the construction, evaluation and maintenance of
Social Networks. Andrea is mostly interested in the use of open
technologies and in understanding how they can improve learning and
teaching as well as the production of software and other artefacts.