WVU ACM & FSG

[Andrew Butcher]

Greetings,

Thanks to all the Freshman Engineers that talked to us and signed up.  It was pretty chaotic in the NRCCE tonight -- not to mention hotter than the sun in that room.

In case you missed anything, or we forgot to mention anything, here's a little bit of information about our organizations as well as information about our first meeting of the year.  I encourage everyone to come out for the meeting -- we'll have some door prizes as well as an abundance of Pizza.

First Meeting of the Year

September 16th @ 5:30 PM -- Room 205 Mineral Resources Building

For our first meeting of the year we'll be hosting Mark Dalrymple.  Here is a short bio as well as what Mark will be discussing with us.

Mark Dalrymple has been a professional programmer for 20 years, specializing in Mac and Unix systems.  A veteran of now-dead startups (Visix, arsDigita) and big technology companies (AOL, Google), he's had code has running on millions of desktops, servers handling hundreds of requests a second, and code in space on the space shuttle.  He's the principal author of "Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh" and "Advanced Mac OS X Programming", and has been technical reviewer for a half dozen iPhone/iPad programming books.   His current project uses mobile technology to bring the worlds of indoor and outdoor cycling together.

Mark will be talking about iDevice-style mobile, and how it differs from the desktop (programming model, resource constraints, etc)  He'll hit the high points of the difficulties (and joys) of the platform, and look at some code along the way.

Association for Computing Machinery

[http://wvu.acm.org] [http://groups.google.com/group/wvuacm]

Who are we?

ACM stands for the Association of Computing Machinery, this does NOT mean that we program farm equipment or gigantic computing systems (We might if we feel like it).  On the contrary, ACM is a National, Educational Computing Society.  What does that mean?  Anything technical in the field of Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering is applicable.

What do we do?

Firstly, we frequently host technical talks on a wide array of topics.  We have also been known to host LAN/Console parties, Linux Install Fests, and other equally geeky social events.  We also sponsor a team for the National ACM Programming Contest every year.

Why should I join?

We're interested in bettering ourselves through hosting these technical talks.  Hopefully you'll learn something if you drop in.  If you're interested in what we're interested in, you're going to meet tons of like-minded people here at WVU.

Membership in the National Organization (http://www.acm.org/membership) is NOT required.  You can come to the meetings and attend our social functions no matter what, in fact, we encourage you to.  Although, if you take it upon yourself to sign up you gain access to an extensive online digital library consisting of hundreds of books and will start receiving Communications Magazine, which covers current topics in world of computing.

Free Software Group

[http://groups.google.com/group/wvu-fsg]

"Raise Awareness, distribute, and encourage the adoption and installation of free software to the Student Body, Morgantown Community, and in Campus Computing Facilities."

Our mission statement is pretty simple to understand, what's difficult is understanding Free Software. In some cases it means "free", as in beer, in all cases it means "free" like speech. The software we're talking about is software you can learn from, share with friends (without legal problems), modify in any you want, and even charge ($) people for those modifications! Try and get away with that with Microsoft Word, or MATLAB.

What are we doing?

We have been working with the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org) to book Richard Stallman as a speaker for the last year. We've finally settled on a date, February 17th, 2010. A lot of our work this semester will be around promoting the event around WVU and the rest the state.

What can you expect to do with the FSF?

Find out about free software alternatives to many programs you thought you had to pay for. Learn how this is all possible. But the real reason anyone would be interested in the FSF is because, simply put, us and the ACM members are the biggest, smartest group of Geeks you'll meet on campus. Our members are constantly finding interesting problems and using Free Software to solve them.

If you're in to interesting problems, if you're into GNU/Linux, if you're in to in intellectual property, you may be interested in the Free Software Group. We invite you to come hang out with us!

Andrew Butcher

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Chair, WVU FSG

Vice Chair, WVU ACM