Nelson Pavlovsky (founder of Students for Free Culture, sued Diebold for abusing copyright law) is coming to speak on the third anniversary of Students for Free Culture. There will be free pizza!

This event is hosted by VT Students for Free Culture. For the latest, see vt.freeculture.org.

Please join us on Monday, April 28, 2008 at the Mailtrust offices on University City Blvd. for an open house event and tech talk. See the flier here.

The open house will be an excellent opportunity to see the everyday culture of a rapidly growing IT company that is quickly expanding within its industry. In fact, in 2008, Mailtrust (formerly Webmail.us) was ranked as the 217th fastest growing company in America by Inc. 500. In addition, just this year, Mailtrust's parent company, Rackspace, was named 32nd on Fortune's list of the 100 best U.S. companies to work for. Mailtrust is continuously hiring talented software developers for both part and full time positions right here in Blacksburg, and prospective candidates may visit www.mailtrust.com/jobs to learn more and appy for job openings.

Following the open house, mailtrust will be holding a tech talk featuring an introduction to the semantic web. This tech talk will be presented by Manu Sporny of Digital Bazaar and will discuss topcs of resource description framework basics, microformats, and authoring tools such as Operator and Fuzzbot. We hope to see you there!

Join the listserv to get advance information on candidate positions as well as other exciting events in the pipeline!

The ACM officer election for the 2008-9 academic year will be held this Friday evening! All currently enrolled students are encouraged to come and have your say (and cast your vote) for the leadership of the next year. We will, as usual, be providing free pizza and drinks for all.

Following the election will be a Google talk by outgoing ACM president and Google ambassador James Knighton. He will be giving a whimsical introduction to some of the best-known publications by Googlers, as well as some of the products that we all know and love.

To close the session, Anthony Romano will be giving a talk on his ground-breaking research in race condition detection and dynamic memory analysis and instrumentation.

A reminder from the IEEE: The upcoming IEEE Undergraduate Research Seminar lecture will be on Wednesday, April 9th at 6:30pm in Randolph 211. Our presenter will be Dr. Schaumont and the title of the session is "Cracking Crypto." Food and refreshments will be provided.

Greg Warrington of Wake Forest's Department of Mathematics will be giving a colloquim talk entitled Juggling Probabilities this Friday at 4:00 pm in the 4th floor McBryde Commons Room. Coffee and cookies will be served from 3:30 to 4:00 pm.

Abstract:
From the right perspective, everything is mathematical — even juggling. In this talk, I'll describe how juggling relates to traditional mathematical fields such as graph theory and look at what happens when a person starts juggling randomly. In doing so, I'll illustrate how these mathematical underpinnings can be useful even to accomplished jugglers. There will be numerous live demonstrations.

Microsoft is now showing 'the love' to students with free full-featured versions of the following software suites:

• Expressions Studio
• Visual Studio 2008 Pro Edition (support for all languages and web development)
• Windows Server 2003 - Standard Edition
• XNA Game Studio 2.0

Microsoft DreamSpark is focused on providing college and high school students with no-cost access to the latest Microsoft developer (i.e., versions of Visual Studio, XNA Game Studio), designer tools (Expression Studio) and Microsoft platform resources (i.e., versions of Windows Server and SQL Server).

Come learn about what DreamSpark includes and how to access DreamSpark software.

Michael Jabs of the G.E.R.M.A.N. Club would like to announce the Gold Rush benefit concert this Tuesday at 7:00 pm in Burruss auditorium, featuring Juxta, Naturally Sharp, Soulstice, Sensations, Always Morning, and more. The suggested donation is $5. All proceeds from the event will be divided into donations to Relay for Life and support for the philanthropies of some of Virginia Tech's sororities. Hope to see you there!

The Google campus ambassador for VT will be in the CS lounge tomorrow afternoon! So drop in and say hello, and while you're at it, grab a slice, pull up a chair, and learn about the exciting opportunities at Google. Are you feeling lucky?

As usual, the ACM has deemed PME's problems to be intellectually bland, and has decided to produce our own problem set for your challenge and enjoyment. The first correct solution will earn ten tacos!

Our thanks to Mr. Harrington for working with us on this one.

Update: slides from the presentation are available here.

Join IBM and the ACM at 7pm on Wednesday, April 2 at McBryde 210 for a tech talk featuring IBM's newest technology platform - Jazz.

Jazz is IBM Rational's next-generation technology platform for collaborative software delivery. Uniquely attuned to global and distributed teams, the Jazz platform is designed to transform how people work together to bulid software - making software delivery more collaborative, productive, and transparent. You can think of Jazz technology as an extensible framework that dynamically integrates and synchronizes people, processes, and assets associated with software development projects.