Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-08-04 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: mitchb geofft, price, quentin, presbrey. jesstess Associate members: asedeno, belmonte Prospectives: biyeun Guests: Officer Reports: mitchb: I've been lame sending out the last several weeks' worth of minutes. I apologize. This will be fixed tonight. SIPB Projects Report: geofft: scripts is in the middle of an upgrade as we speak. We're blocking on figuring out how to get the Fedora installer to do the right thing. quentin: xvm finally got rails for its equipment that fit in our racks. We installed hardware. We're getting close to having a production cluster. price: Yeah, that should happen in about a week or two. We should be ready to launch a non-alpha service by the beginning of term. price: We have a couple of jobs still open for the coming year. We need someone to organize IAP (this can be split between a couple of people). We run several IAP classes, tons of people take them. We have a lot of experience doing this, so you'd have lots of stuff to look at. quentin: IAP is sooner than you think. price: We also hope to run a Cluedump series in the Fall. This is less work than running IAP. I'd be glad to have someone volunteer and talk with me about it after the meeting. It would be good to get this settled before term starts. Office Report: belmonte: Periodically the A/C drains get plugged and the A/C spills water all over the floor. This happened again this past week and the perimeter A/C near the machine room at the back of the office leaked. They asked us to move the furniture, which is hard, and then they didn't return, so jhawk unplugged the drain. Since this seems to happen with some frequency, jhawk has asked me to move to allocate $40 for a couple of dollys to be permanently placed under the major pieces of furniture that need to be moved sometimes. price: So we're talking about the two big filing cabinets. geofft: Aside from things with wheels, there are things that can add rubber to the bottom of furniture to make it easier to push. belmonte: We should direct specific suggestions like that to jhawk. belmonte: You all saw mail from jhawk about suing telemarketers who call us. I think it's awesome someone is willing to deal with that, and we should all provide him with the info he requests. quentin: jhawk wants to collect evidence he can use to subpoena the phone companies for identifying info about the telemarketers who call us so that he can sue them. He'd like us to collect the originating number, time of call, whether the message identified the name of the entity that originated the call or its phone number, and if you transcribe the message, that's great, too. geofft: I'd like to move to buy "Dive Into Python" ($30), "The Humane Interface" ($37), "The Design of Everyday Things" ($12), the Dragon Book ($88), "How to Design Programs" ($55), and "Programming Pearls" ($32), "How to Solve It" ($12), "Concrete Mathematics" ($60). price: So, eight books, most about computing, and all well-respected in their field. geofft: I move to allocate up to $400 to buy these. quentin: Seems like a lot of money. geofft: It is. But I'm surprised that we don't have some of these books. jesstess: Don't we have approximately infinite money? price: Well, on this scale. mitchb: On the scale of spending half a thousand dollars? We don't have an infinite amount of half thousands. price: Yeah, we shouldn't buy this many books every week. geofft: Right. But these are books I've collected over the last two weeks. mitchb: Oh, well, that's different. We have an infinite number of quarters of thousands of dollars. <7-1-0 - up to $400 to geofft for the above enumerated books> Other: quentin: Last Monday, Facilities decided to shut off the chilled water in the building, which caused the machine room temperature to rise quickly, about 10 Celsius degrees in an hour. belmonte: My understanding is that this wasn't a random decision, and was a response to a burst pipe. quentin: I'm sure Facilities had their reasons... mitchb: Thanks... we've been wanting for a minutes quote for a while. quentin: ... but they did a poor job of communicating it to the building occupants. asedeno: Hooray, it was not the next great office flood. mitchb: Oh, now you're going to make me choose between quotes? geofft: Lenny froze. geofft: Barnowl is blocking on a release-critical bug that isn't in Lenny. It only affects jis.mit.edu. Other Other: quentin: PSA: everyone should check their bikes to make sure that everything is securely fastened. My front wheel turned 90 degrees relative to the handlebar. belmonte: What caused this? quentin: I believe the handlebar was loose. mitchb: HTGAMIT went to the publisher today! biyeun: I just finished building 8x10 camera! asedeno: DEFCON is this weekend! The meeting was adjourned at 19:52. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.