Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-03-03 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: mitchb, quentin, tabbott, arolfe, jesstess, jwalden, broder, nelhage, kaduk, mathmike, golem, price, jhawk Associate members: asedeno, dkk, kchen Prospectives: ternus, neboat Guests: dkk's kid Officer Reports: price: I nominate ternus for membership. Many: Second <17-0-1, ternus is nominated> kaduk: Spend money. tabbott: How much do we have left? kaduk: ~$14,800 tabbott: Is that including Athena fees? kaduk: It's all of our uncommitted funds. jhawk: So, it is not accounting for the Athena fees. tabbott: So, we expect to have to pay for Athena fees? kaduk: Yes, though I haven't had time to thoroughly review the notes about how much they will cost. price: So we have a bit under $15k to spend, minus Athena fees, and should do it before the end of term so that we buy good items instead of whatever we can get at the last minute. jhawk: Also, we'd ideally want to take delivery by the beginning of May [corrected to the beginning of June after some discussion]. price: If you want to buy things, think about them and make proposals. MIT Computing Report: quentin: TNIS claims to have reset first floor Stata access points. Many people seem not to have seen the usual problem today. SIPB Projects Report: ternus: Over the past week and a half or so, I've been working on a SIPB CUPS server. If you add the line 'servername cups.servers.csail.mit.edu' to /etc/cups/client.conf and restart CUPS, you can use that to print to printers that don't require Kerberos, including meadow and W20 cluster printers. There are still some kinks to work out, but for now it's working. It'll queue your job to the appropriate lpr queue for the printer and then disappear from CUPS, so you can't remove jobs from CUPS, but you can lprm them as usual. I'll be adding more printers tonight. You can e-mail us at sipb-cups@mit.edu andersk: How easy will it be to integrate CUPS and Kerberos? ternus: Currently, it doesn't look like it can be done without writing code. We don't see ourselves implementing this very soon, but it's possible. tabbott: I've heard rumor that the CUPS Kerberos support is only for server-to-server auth. broder: There's a checkbox to turn it on. nelhage: I created a jifty locker for the jifty Perl framework. Directions are at jifty.scripts.mit.edu. You can also 'add jifty' and then 're.pl' to get all that REPL-y goodness other languages have. ternus: I've been working on producing the door sensor graphs requested by nelhage. We have graphs for this week showing how long the door has been open. Contrary to popular belief, it's not open consistently for very long periods of time. The longest stretch it's been open consistently (where "consistently" is defined as only having closings no longer than 12 minutes in duration) is less than 21 hours. The current pony is a calendar for each hour in each day with opacity based on probability of the office being open at that hour. tabbott: The Firefox wrapper on Athena has "features" that delete all your lockfiles and such... I think I've rooted out all the evil things it does, and the result is going to become a Debathena package. Office Report: price: I believe there are now 23 people in the office. It's very full. Joyously, it's been this way several times recently. Looking around, there are people sitting on milk crates (yoz), etc. The couch isn't a great place to work; I think people prefer desks. There are desks back here big enough for more than one person, but usually people don't seem comfortable sharing desks. tabbott: Isn't there often a lot of stuff on those tables preventing work? price: I think one thing we should keep in mind and be vigilant about is junk accumulating on tables. [points to various piles of stuff on desks]. People should remove things that don't belong as they see them. price: On the same topic of things being left in the office that don't belong here, there's one place I want to call attention to. The office is common space, we need access to drawers, etc. There's this corner over here [goes to bookshelf corner]. It seems to have been colonized as a personal mini-office by one member. This has been pointed out over the years by chairs, officers, and others in the Board, without the situation resolving itself. For those who can't see it right now, there's [long itemization of items in improper locations]. Because informal/semiformal/semipublic remonstrations by various people have not worked over the years, I would like to ask the Board to formally adopt a motion. price: In view of jhawk's chronic abuse of office common space, I move that he be required not to keep his personal items and items not related to FTGOS stored in the common space of the SIPB aside from in his drawer. dkk: In terms of scale, currently a coat is a lot of the volume, and we shouldn't restrict coats in the office. There are some items under the desk that could be useful to others. Also, has he been given the opportunity of a large enough drawer (his is smaller than many others). price: It's true there's a coat here, but there's a lot of stuff underneath it [reveals items beneath coat]. The coat does add to the visual bulk, though. As for under the drawers, I feel that stuff there interferes with placing your legs there, which is where you ought to be able to place them. And as for the drawer, it's the size of most people's drawers with the exception of larger ones that are shared. If there are other large individual ones, we could consider a drawer swap. jhawk: I don't see anything improper with your motion or inconsistent with the common space practices of the SIPB, so it may not even be necessary. I'll also note that some of the items you noted aren't mine, though most are. price: I think the reason it's necessary is that people have remonstrated over this in the past, and it never has had a long-term effect. dkk: There has been other abuse of space that's not cyclic in other student groups. Some of them find other places to store items. arolfe: In September 2003, I made a motion similar to this and phrased it to refer to things of jhawk's that are in the office when he is not, which avoids the coat issue. tabbott: [to jhawk] Do you believe you're currently in compliance with the proposed motion? jhawk: No. price: Okay, so it sounds like John basically agrees with the motion. Are there any other comments? [pause] Okay, do I hear a second? dkk: You may want to consider not naming anyone explicitly if this is not a censure-level motion. price: I don't feel that a formal motion is required for other people. tabbott: I second. <9-2-7 motion passes> quentin: People keep talking about how we'd like new office heads. I propose getting a new office head, in particular a top-of-the-line Mac Mini 2GHz Core-2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 24" wide monitor. Computer is about $1000, monitor is about $500. I move to allocate $1700 for this. broder: Which machine would it replace? quentin: People have talked about zsr and opus, though certainly not zsr's monitor. ternus: If opus is replaced, would the scanning capability be retained? [much baby crying drowned out some of the discussion...] jhawk: There's some need for the opus scanner; I had some problems with contrast and such on the other scanner that I couldn't resolve recently. quentin: Also, we could replace oliver's smallish screen with another one. That would make it more desirable as a hotseat. broder: I assert that dual-boot machines are not useful because they don't ever change state. tabbott: I agree with the assessment. someone: You don't have to reboot, just push a button on the login screen. quentin: We could replace zsr's hardware and do something else with the new screen. broder: If we got another 30" monitor, we'd need to get another machine capable of driving it. kaduk: quentin, you've said negative things about Mac Mini hard drives before... why do you think one would be acceptable now? price: Do we want a third Mac office head? If we punted zsr in favor of a third Mac, there'd be close to as many Macs as any other variant of Athena in the office. quentin: People saying they don't use the Mac means they don't use the Mac for Debathena. ternus: I'm looking at Newegg now in terms of available monitors... they'll sell us a 28" monitor for $549. quentin: With what connectors? ternus: HDMI, but I have a converter. price: Queutin, do you want to propose something over e-mail? quentin: Can we try the vote now? Other: dnawi: Cokecomm's money holder is now in the butter thing on the door, even more hidden than before (inside the door, inside the compartment). price: What's the intended way to use it? dnawi: Take it out, there's a hole in the top, put the money in there. Change will be kept in the bottom drawer to handle large bill change-making needs. nelhage: After the meeting, I'll be doing the sipb-afs cleanup I had previously mentioned. Other Other: '() The meeting was adjourned at 20:07. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.