Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-06-16 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by kaduk. In attendance were Voting members: geofft, kaduk, jhawk, mitchb, kaduk | quentin, price Associate members: kchen, asedeno, tabbott, andersk | jbarnold, yoz Prospectives: biyeun, dnawi Guests: Officer Reports: kaduk: There's a new blanket PO number for Quantum, to be used by officers only. Contact an officer if you need to make a Quantum purchase. I'll see that it gets disseminated correctly. kaduk: This is a little awkward as price is not here. However, as noted in e-mail, the SIPB keybox now has two fewer keys than it used to. They were accepted by jis. If you want more details, you can consult the e-mail archive, or ask price for more details, as I won't make a full report in his absence. mitchb: Have we heard about our budget for next year yet? kaduk: We haven't. tabbott: They usually don't tell us anything in advance. We usually just look in SAP and find out what it is. SIPB Projects Report: geofft: Barnowl got officially accepted to Debian. kaduk: price has been in touch with IS&T about acquiring new hardware for sipb-xen. mitchb: As I mentioned on zephyr, if any of you can think of a SIPB project that would benefit from a possible donation of maybe a couple hundred multicore Intel processors... I forget what type I said... jhawk: You said quad-core Intel Xeon. mitchb: Right, that. Let me know, like, immediately. One of the PIs in my research group asked me to check if SIPB could make good use of them. This is the same group the blade cluster came from. It would be only the processors, though. Can anyone think of anything? The offer that was made to that group and some others (not all at MIT) basically can't happen if it's not arranged this week. [Some discussion, but no real ideas that don't involve significant other hardware.] mitchb: Okay, if nobody tells me otherwise soon, I guess we'll pass. mitchb: Speaking of the blade cluster, it was temporarily loaned to us mainly for XVM (formerly sipb-xen), but has been used by some other projects as well. Since XVM has decided on what it's requesting, I was asked recently by price when we should be returning it. Since it sounds like the hardware acquisition is proceeding, I propagated that question, and the answer that a consensus was reached on was to let SIPB continue to use it as a foo cluster for the foreseeable future, with the understanding that if at some point in the future it needs to be reclaimed, we'd get some amount of reasonable (upwards of a month) notice. Would SIPB like to keep it? price: That seems very generous. jhawk: Isn't this a discussion that should happen between service maintainers? price: It sounds like the question is only whether we'd like to keep it as opposed to what to do with it. mitchb: Right. price: Then I think the answer is clearly "yes." mitchb: The only downside I can see to it is ending up relying on it for something, and then needing to give it back. But in reality, if some service is important enough to us to have real hardware, I can't imagine that over the course of a month, we couldn't acquire a computer for it. Okay, so then I'll go through the complicated process of accepting the offer (which involves sending an e-mail to two people letting them know the machine room's room number). price: I'm thinking of having a hackathon for XVM and other stuff this coming weekend. Tell me which day you'd come. Office Report: kaduk: I see we now have a different orientation of machines and monitors. price: Right. We have empty table space where opus used to be. It's awesome; I'm using it right now. We may want to change power configuration because of all these cables stretched across the table that need to be pulled to reach anything as their associated power bricks weigh them down. geofft: Having a view of what's going on under the table, I think some of this problem could be solved by having something to hold up the bricks under the table so that you don't have to pull up hard to lift them. quentin: Where's kid-icarus going to end up? It shouldn't be in laptop-land. price: I was going to put it where zsr is. quentin: I don't think we have consensus that we should get rid of zsr. price: There was an e-mail thread. I didn't hear more than a couple of people saying that we should keep it. geofft: I move to get rid of zsr. tabbott: "Get rid of" may be wrong; we could put it in the rack or something. quentin: Greg mentioned sending mail to deactivate it, which sounds like getting rid of it. mitchb: I remember seeing it suggested that it wasn't too important to figure out how to handle the space right now because it's the summer and the office is less populous. But, welcome to the summer... we presently have no available office heads. I'd rather we not get rid of another when they're all in use right now. jbarnold: I'm only using this one [kid-icarus] because it was on laptop-land. Otherwise I'd be using my laptop. quentin: How about putting kid-icarus under that table and connecting it to the monitor that's never hooked up to anything but laptops? asedeno: What about when we have the next great office flood? geofft: How many have there been? asedeno: I remember one. [some discussion about how deep the water was] geofft: How about getting rid of the office rack by putting sipb-tor in the machine room, etc. and moving the monolith into its space, and then adding more desk space where the monolith was? mitchb: I don't know if everyone else feels this way, but something we've had in the past was a head (with a chair) on top of the monolith. I'd be fine with using that to have another head available. geofft: There's no space on the monolith. mitchb: But there will be after sipbmp3 gets fixed, right? geofft: Yeah. price: We could move kid-icarus where zsr is, and put zsr, bart, and deathtongue on the KVM, and have the KVM's head appear on the table where the monitor is now. jhawk: On Friday, Property tagged the new Dell. price: We have here the CRT from opus, which was manufactured in October of 2000. Reviews say that this particular model had great picture quality. Last time ours was on, black showed as bright gray. It had the diagonal lines that kchen pointed out. It's possible that with further effort, it can be a nice display better than some of our others, and can justify being enormous. kaduk: I plugged my laptop in and got nice crisp picture and saw that the diagonal lines were basically gone. price: I hear people say that CRTs get better color quality than LCDs. I don't know if that's still true these days. jhawk: It is. price: But it's 8 years old, so that [making it better again] may not be plausible. But we'll put some effort into it and see whether we should keep it. kaduk: Can it not live on that table? geofft: I move to purchase "Beautiful Code" (ISBN 1590597141). It's a book about... code. It's $40. The other book I'd like to buy is "Founders at Work" (ISBN 0596510047). It has Y-combinator and other stories. It's $17. So I'd like to allocate up to $70. price: We've run out of copies of iZephyr, and a user was looking for it recently. mitchb: I made an emergency overnight purchase of iLaTeX when we ran out of them during the week that theses were due. I'm happy to get more of iZephyr if the Board wants them, but I've also heard people express that they think the iDocuments other than iLaTeX are not worthwhile. tabbott: iZephyr doesn't represent how people use Zephyr today. I think we should print a couple copies of it on meadow and declare victory. mitchb: That's really what you want us to do? Okay. I guess it sounds like some real revision would be a useful project that we should encourage someone to do. price: Perhaps we should print some of the barnowl wiki? Other: jbarnold: It's with mixed emotions that I remind the Secretary that the list of voting members at the top of these minutes is four usernames too long, as some of us have graduated and are no longer students. [actually some of the above sentence was cut short] mitchb: You missed me asking tabbott and andersk when they entered whether they believed they were still voting members and getting the answer "that's a good question." There seems to be some confusion about what happens over the summer. So, no reminding is necessary; I'm aware of the issue, but it's on the queue to be figured out later. Other Other: quentin: The Celtics might just have a chance of winning the championship for the first time in ~20 years. The meeting was adjourned at 20:03. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.