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Congratulations to all who entered and especially the winning schools who received their prizes at the grand prizegiving ceremony on 24 June. See the BCS Press Release for more details.

On the left, the team from Trinity C of E Primary in Henley receiving the silver Challenge Cup from BCS President Alan Pollard; right the Student Pod team from Oxford High School with the Senior Winners' Shield.

Feedback from schools

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For technically-minded web designers and developers, the thirteenth Oxford Geek Night will give you a chance to exchange ideas in the informal atmosphere of the upstairs room at the Jericho Tavern, and listen to an eclectic mix of short keynote and micro-slot sessions.

Free to attend, Geek Night 13 is sponsored by The Guardian Open Platform and Torchbox.

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Our May meeting was the last in our 2008/9 programme of monthly events. As it was our AGM, we served a light cheese and wine buffet beforehand instead of the usual coffee and biscuits.

The meeting started with a short business session reporting on the past year, looking forward to 2009/10, and electing committee members.

Then our main speaker, Microsoft's Michael McClary, told us about Silverlight, a free cross-browser, cross-platform runtime from Microsoft designed to deliver rich application experiences and high quality video to the desktop. The talk was interspersed with many demos and real-world examples.

Apress, one of the world's leading technical publishers, had provided several relevant books as well as tokens for ebooks to be given away on the night. Preference was given to people who were willing to write a short book review.

2009 AGM Agenda - Chairman's report on 2008/9 for 2009 AGM - 2008 AGM minutes - Meeting Poster - more

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Launched on 10 March 2009, the 2009 BCS Student Contest invites students to compete for the top prize, an Asus Eee PC, by programming their best Four-in-a-Row strategy game in Java. The contest runs until June 1st.

Print this poster to promote the competition in your school, college or university

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This year's branch visit to SophosLabs in Abingdon was so popular that all the places were taken within a few hours of our April eBCSOxon newletter going out.

We apologise to everyone who wanted to come but didn't see the newsletter in time. We are hoping to arrange future similar visits. Keep watching the newsletters and the branch website.

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The online library, provided through an agreement with Books 24x7, gives members access to a periodically updated selection of 200 business and technical publications. You can search the library and read the full text of the books online.

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In our survey, several of you said you were worried about coming to meetings because of the problems of parking in Oxford.

Although Oxford can be very difficult in daytime, until recently in the evenings when we hold our meetings there were usually plenty of spaces in Keble Road. As at November 2006, the parking situation Keble Road in the evenings has got worse, possibly as a result of overflow from St Giles where evening parking is now free.

We now advise you to arrive in good time for the meetings to give yourself a better chance of finding a parking place in Keble Road, or to allow time park somewhere like Norham Gardens and walk back.

Warning: if Keble Road is full and you park round the corner in Blackhall Road, make sure you don't park in one of the bays restricted to residents. These bays are patrolled in the evenings and one of our committee was ticketed recently.

...details.

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The experimental branch wiki has a default theme with a slightly less overpowering shade of blue! Wikis are becoming popular for collaborative projects because, unlike traditional bulletin boards, they don't impose rigid threaded structures. You are welcome to visit our wiki, register and see what you think of it. Use the wiki itself to share your thoughts.
Probably the best known wiki is the collaborative encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, which has grown to nearly half a million articles.

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Try the SonicWALL Phishing IQ Test.

Note this is a link to an external site not connected to BCS and no endorsement of their products is necessarily implied.

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September 2007: The java-based method of generating the site from XML source using SAXON, which had already been proved to work on Windows and Linux, has now been ported to Mac OS X, facilitating cross-browser compatibility testing on Safari as well as Firefox, Opera, IE and Konqueror.
November 2006: Google Analytics hooks removed
June 2006: Google Analytics added. See the privacy page for more details.
May 2006: the old website at www.bcsoxon.org is decommissioned and no longer available.
November 2005: show/hide functionality added
May 2005: Default font changed to Trebuchet; the RSS feed fixed so that it works with Firefox (previously it worked with FeedReader and Opera but not Firefox)
August 2004: Details of the 2004/5 meeting programme
May 2004: Displays of latest updates to the wiki and personalised newsfeed.
May 2004: Site running in parallel on old and new hosts, with reminders to update your bookmarks if you use pages on the old host.
April 2004: "Contact Us" page processing rewritten in php.
March 2004: amend the stylesheets to allow generation of pages with PHP extension.
March 2004: the RSS feed is now (optionally) dynamically generated from our prototype events database.
March 2004: form processing for the May 2004 trip implemented in PHP using the new BCS Member Group Hosting service.
December 2003: high contrast pages now generated by BETSIE
December 2003: XML/RSS events feed added
November 2003: Front page tidied up, live news feed added in an iframe
November 2003: iCal calendar entries supplied to help you add meetings to your calendar
October 2003: Added high contrast versions of the pages which we hope may be helpful to partially sighted users.
October 2003: XSL was modified to generate code referencing external CSS stylesheets rather than littering the HTML pages with the now deprecated <FONT> tags. If you are using Netscape 4.x and have problems with the formatting, you might like to upgrade to Netscape 7.1.
August 2003: updated to use XSLT 2.0 and XInclude.