Our speaker was Liam Newcombe, secretary of the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group, which is raising the awareness of just how "Green" we are in the IT industry.

Liam gave us the real facts and figures with information about what we as an industry are doing and can do about it.

The pre-meeting refreshments were sponsored by One-Click, a new UK company offering intelligent switches to help reduce electrical waste. Demo models were on show on the night, and One-Click are offering a special discount valid for one month from the meeting.

Access Grid is an advanced collaboration environment which has been described as "videoconferencing on steroids".

In this Joint Session with Chester & North Wales branch, Michael Daw, Head of the UK Access Grid Support Centre at the University of Manchester, delivered his talk from the Daresbury Lab using live Access Grid video links with the OERC escience building in Oxford, the Rutherford and Appleton Lab and Bangor University.

Michael's slides are here.

The 7th of November was a showcase night for the Oxford branch of the British Computer Society on its 50th anniversary year, 2007.

A stunning venue of Science Oxford was used to promote the services that the BCS offers both its members and non members. Wine and Millets farm cheese was on offer to refresh our guests.

The venue offered 2 rooms, a presentation room which was manned by committee members offering information and advice to those who sought to find out more about the BCS. Lots of leaflets and other information packs were available along with some fun BCS 50th branded items for our guests to take home.
Meanwhile upstairs in Hands on guests were toying over the puzzles and exhibits on offer from 8 till 9 p.m.

Many mini competitions and quizzes were held over the evening. These included a facts based quiz for the visitors to hands on and a wine tasting quiz in the main presentation room.

Come the end of the evening at 9 p.m prizes were given out for participants. Seven BCS branded carry bags were won by those who scored highly in the 'Hands on' quiz. A BCS branded Cross pen set was won in a BCS knockout quiz. Theatre Vouchers were won by the luck of Bingo balls and we presented the winner of the wine tasting competition with a wine tasting guide CD.

In total near 50 people attended with a spread of members, non members and a good presence from our YPG membership. Lots of fun was had by all, not least the organisers and we wish to thank our membership for a wonderful 50 years and hope we continue to go from strength to strength.

We were delighted to welcome Tom Ilube as the speaker for our 2007 Christmas lecture. Tom was CIO of Egg and is now CEO of technology startup Garlik, a new company aimed at increasing consumer awareness of what information about them is publicly available, and helping to prevent identity theft.

This session turned out to be even more topical than we had expected, for several reasons:

1. All the publicity surrounding the recent loss of data at HMRC, and
2. the announcement on 29 November 2007 from The World Economic Forum that Garlik was one of 39 visionary companies selected as their Technology Pioneers 2008.
   If you missed Tom's talk (and even if you didn't) you may be interested to watch this interview which was released to mark the WEF announcement.
3. Garlik's announcement, also on 29 November, of a free service called QDOS which is aimed at getting consumers engaged with their own online digital presence.

Tom explained that many people find it hard to relate to the concept of digital identity. Their eyes glaze over when you try to talk to them about it.

Makers of shredders have capitalised on consumers' liking for something tangible, and indeed one shredder manufacturer has sponsored security events: unfortunately, people may be tempted to think that their identity is safe just because they have bought a shredder.

Tom told us how relatively easy it was to find out enough information about many individuals to be able to use those details to apply for credit cards and even passports. The task is made even easier by people who are willing readily to disclose personal information and who agree to be "friends" with strangers on social networking sites such as Facebook.

In the identity theft industry, typically, personal information about individuals is collected and sold on to others who make fraudulent use of it. It is hard for law enforcement agencies to proceed against the people who collect information: gathering information from public sources is not illegal per se. If questioned, they can claim they are just doing "market research". However, such information can be sold on, and Tom was therefore able to put a potential value on the information in the CDs "mislaid" by HMRC.

In a lively Q&A session after his talk, Tom explained how Garlik had built a data store which now contains billions of RDF triples which define the relationships between people and their personal data. This technology, he said, scaled much better than conventional relational databases because of the overhead of building and maintaining indices to support efficient queries on any column. Elsewhere on the web, Steve Harris, a software architect at Garlik, has posted that the Garlik store imports at over 70k triples/sec and that’s only just fast enough to keep up with incoming data.

After the meeting, Tom had to hurry away to work on what we now know was the upcoming launch of QDOS, but many attendees repaired to the Lamb and Flag to continue the discussion over the now traditional mince pies and mulled wine.

Our January speaker, Sverker Griph, gave us a brief rundown of the history of fission and fusion, starting with the failed physics teacher, working in the Bern patent office, who published four ground-breaking papers in 1905 and introduced e=mc**2 to the world.

JET was set up to pursue the goal of clean electricity from nuclear fusion. It provides many challenges: for the IT people the huge amount of data which the experiments generate in a very short time, and for the national grid the challenge of handling a sudden demand for up to 1.2GW to power the experiment.

For our February meeting, we took a look at virtual worlds and, in particular, Second Life.

IBM has long been recognised as an interested player in virtual worlds. Roo Reynolds (right) told us how a handful of brave IBMers first began a foray into Second Life and other virtual worlds, and how this grass-roots interest became widespread adoption within the company.

See also the article by Karen Price, chief executive of e-skills UK, in the January 31 edition of Computing, on how they have been using Second Life to run events such as virtual careers fairs.

You might also be interested in the April 2008 issue of PCPro which carried an article entitled "Real Trouble in Virtual Worlds".

Three speakers presented their ideas for new technology applications: an easy to use web presence for takeaway restaurants, a communications gadget for tour groups, and an advertising-funded service providing email and web calendaring for local clubs and societies.

Presenters were questioned by the audience and by our distinguished expert panellists, Dr Jan Hruska, co-founder and Director of Sophos, Eileen Modral, who manages the Oxford Investment Opportunity Network (OION), Jeff Barr, Senior Manager of Web Services Evangelism with Amazon, and branch webmaster Adrian Walmsley.

When the audience voted at the end of the evening, only two votes separated the three contenders. The winner was David Langer for groupspaces.

This year's branch visit was a guided tour including the Gun Shed, the Tank Shed at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham. The tour of the military vehicles and hardware has always been one of the highlights at the prizegiving for our Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition, so we were delighted that branch members have had a chance to see it for themselves.

An added bonus was the visit to the unique collection in the Small Arms Armoury. In a very small space it houses a vast range of small arms from Britain and around the world throughout the ages, mostly in working order and regularly fired.

We started with an introduction to the Brown Bess musket, which was standard equipment in the British army for over 100 years, from the early eighteenth century till it was superseded in the early nineteenth.

We learned why the Brown Bess had a larger bore than the French muskets (so we could use their ammunition but not vice versa), the origins of the phrases "half-cock" and "flash in the pan" and why infantry were not allowed to wear full beards.