Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 01/16/2006 The meeting was called to order at 7:30 PM by jbarnold. In attendance were Voting members: jbarnold kchen golem arolfe tabbott | wdaher rayhe Associate members: asedeno ocschwar | awozniak Prospectives: presbrey cporter | jwalden jdseale erlkonig Guests: Treasurer's Report: arolfe: I believe we've been paid back for all books that were destroyed in the flood. arolfe: I wish it had taken less than 6 months to complete this process. arolfe: Now would be a good time to think about spending the rest of our money for thsi year. This will hopefully avoid rushed decisions in April. golem: Ha ha. arolfe: If I say it every week, maybe it'll happen. jbarnold: I've been thinking about setting up a big hard drive cell for Athena users that is less reliable than Athena but also gives people much more space. jbarnold: This solves the problem of people wanting to be able to store lots of media or data in an athena-accessible way. kchen: You can get more space on Athena. tabbott: You're not going to get a 5GB home directory, though. jbarnold: Well, you can get many 350GB hard drives for not that much money, as long as you don't buy Sun hardware and SCSI hard drives. arolfe: We could do this with SIPB AFS. cporter: Is there a reason we shouldn't move to do this now? jbarnold: Not many people are at this meeting, and I'd want to give advance notice by e-mail before spending n thousand dollars. golem: You'll need a fair amount of hardware and supporting infrastructure. I heartily support it if you're willing do all the work involved. jbarnold: I think you can mostly do it with one server and a lot of hard drives. golem: You may need more than one server. arolfe: Anything you do in SIPB afs is going to be network limited. golem: There are hardware and network issues. jbarnold: It's currently kind of lame that all SIPB servers share a 100Mb uplink. Chairman's Report: jbarnold: February 6th, the Monday of Registration Day, which is one week before elections, we will have the State of the SIPB meeting. [ At the meeting, I stated this date as "the Monday before Registration Day" because I incorrectly thought that Reg Day was Tuesday -- jbarnold] Office Report: '() Office Cleaning Report: cporter: The office is more pitly than before christmas. kchen: Whether the office is a pit or not varies with the person observing it. MIT Computing Report: kchen: Account deactivation is happening on Wednesday awozniak: How long after it can people get sponsored? kchen: At least a year. arolfe: Your homedir gets renamed, but is easily restored for a long time. Computer Services: jbarnold: scripts.mit.edu is having its first class friday. We currently have some autoinstallers to install things like a phpbb in your homedir. They'll be officially released on Friday. arolfe: Apparently, some SIPB services are not appropriate for elementary school children. jdseale: I'm working on the inessential guide to Stata. I'm looking for people interested in editing it, though I already have some. presbrey: SIPB's tor exit node is up and running, and is at capacity. jbarnold: I hear it's currently sucking 10Mb right now. awozniak: I'm here to solicit SIPB advertising events in the Women of the East Side calendar. Prices are negotiable. You can get banner ads or events listed. jbarnold: Keith has been telling me that we should advertise scripts.mit.edu in the Tech, but that's expensive. This does sound cheaper. golem: We can combine this with your hard drive service. jbarnold: Isn't that the secret purpose anyway? golem: You need to have automated feeds to the Internet, though. jdseale: Andrew is looking for a SIPB project. jbarnold: On the issue of projects, I can brainstorm later with people. awozniak: Seriously, would SIPB be interested in said advertising? jbarnold: Sending it to the mailing list seems correct, unless someone wants to make a motion. cporter: I move to allocate $300 for advertising in this. wdaher: Our money is free, but $300 is kind of a lot. cporter: For advertising? This is dirt cheap. awozniak: It's a 17-page calendar, so it'll have some sort of effect for a year. jbarnold: I've recently been feeling SIPB needs to be more fiscally responsible, so I'm not a fan of this idea. golem: Do we have any evidence that we're running low on money? jbarnold: $300 is another 500 GB hard drive... golem: This is not a zero-sum game, if you vote for other people's purchases, they'll vote for yours. wdaher: just like real congress jbarnold: Before we vote, why don't we bring it down to $150? awozniak: Amendment is friendly. awozniak: The ad will probably have a banner, about 1" by 8" at the bottom of the page, alterating in several months (at least 3) through the calendar, saying something like "Come to SIPB meetings 7:30 PM Mondays in W20-557". [Vote: 4-2-3 $150 for advertising in Women of the East Side] Publications Report: '() Orientation Report: '() IAP Report: cporter: Everyone should come to W20-575 to see me give an iMatlab, the course. [Begin message inserted into the minutes, intended to be said by jbarnold for jtu]: If you're teaching, please take a minute at the beginning of class to do a quick handcount of if your students heard about your class from - Infinite slides - Goldenrod booklets (distributed from our office) - Anne Hunter's email Send mail to sipb-iap-sucker with the answer, so we can make publicity even better for you next year! [End message from jtu] CokeComm Report: '() Other: cporter: It's really really cold. arolfe: Over break, my mother got a new machine running linux. She was won over by it has more games than windows. ocshcwar: The Charles River is an excellent weather gauge. jwalden: Along the lines of it being cold, yesterday I locked my bike outsidec Hunt wrap-up, and my key would not open the lock. Today, my key broke in the lock. I had to use a hacksaw to release the bike. ocshcwar: If you use stolen liquid nitrogen to release your bike, the MIT police know it was an MIT student, and only worry about the stolen liquid nitrogen. wdaher: I'm still on a jury. jbarnold: Wow. rayhe: Who's on the jury? wdaher: 3 MIT students, a Sloan professor, and a Harvard professor, including me. golem: So, is he guilty? wdaher: We'll see. awozniak: One of the shots is "Girls in the Cluster". awozniak: The CAC night manager came in and just stared. awozniak: The Athena owl is incorporated with a toga of header sheets. jdseale: I'm at the back of the picture tooling. Other Other: The meeting was adjourned at 7:49 PM Minutes taken and submitted by tabbott.