Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-08-18


The meeting was called to order at 19:30:30 by quentin.

In attendance were 
	Voting members: mitchb, jhawk, quentin | geofft
	Associate members: asedeno, keithw, belmonte
	Prospectives: rishig | xavid, y_z
	Guests: 

Officer Reports:

	quentin: mitchb, you're the only officer here; do you have anything
		to report?
	mitchb: I sent out all the minutes I said I was going to.

	jhawk: I'd still like the EC to report on what it's done recently.
	mitchb: It's done nothing.

SIPB Projects Report:

	keithw: I think LAMP should run some advertising in The Tech over
		orientation.  If you'd like to help design such an ad,
		please get in touch with quentin; he's in charge.
	jhawk: Are you proposing using SIPB's advertising space?
	keithw: No, LAMP has its own money for this now.

	quentin: XVM has run out of RAM on the dev cluster.  This is good
		because it means XVM is being used a lot, but it's bad
		because we're now under severe pressure to move machines to
		the production cluster.
	geofft: How much RAM is this?
	quentin: About 20GB are allocated to VMs.

	geofft: I woke up this morning and decided to take the Fedora 7
		scripts machines out of commission, and did so, and there
		were some outages because I was inept.
	jhawk: Where does scripts announce outages?
	quentin: Scheduled or unscheduled?
	jhawk: Yes.
	quentin: Scheduled outages get announced to 3down, and unscheduled
		outages are often not announced.
	[laughter]
	geofft: Today's outage was about an hour long and only affected port
		444, and we decided it wasn't important enough to announce
		beyond -c sipb.

Office Report:

	jhawk: The furniture dollies for the file cabinets have been ordered.
		The filters in the perimeter A/C units have been replaced.
		SLP's new office has been allocated breaker 15 in the circuit
		panel in our office.
	quentin: Does that mean SLP will be getting a key to this space if
		they didn't already have it?
	jhawk: No.  There was mysterious dripping from the ceiling the other
		week that nobody has been able to trace.

Other:

	geofft: CertAid is a thing from IS&T that configures your Safari
		web browser on MacOS to present certs to websites that
		CertAid maintainers think should be seeing your certificates,
		because Safari doesn't provide certs to sites that have them
		as optional.
	keithw: How do you get your website added to this list?
	geofft: You e-mail them.

	quentin: In MIT Computing, several AFS servers, Stellar servers,
		etc. went down.
	mitchb: I don't think the servers actually went down at all.  It
		was just a network problem.
	quentin: Well, the services were down.
	[some discussion about whether you could have used those services
	if you were on their network, and whether there'd have been a DNS
	server on that network to help you out]
	geofft: It was 18.92, wasn't it?
	mitchb: I think it was more recent than that.

	jhawk: In the continuing saga from the past two years of handling
		Ecat Newark Inone orders, you seem to get a 10% discount
		ordering through MIT's portal, or a 15% discount ordering on
		their site if they think you're from MIT.  The problems have
		varied over time.
	keithw: How's that automated SMTP delay site coming?

	jhawk: In Computing Services...
	mitchb: Wait... Computing Services as distinct from MIT Computing?
	jhawk: Yes.
	mitchb: And these two nonexistent reports under Other differ how?
	jhawk: The machine room has acquired a large red water alarm, which
		I'm told does not include an audible component, but does
		notify Facilities and DOST.
	quentin: Do we get these notices?
	jhawk: No.
	quentin: Would you be willing to ask that we get the notices?
	jhawk: I'm willing to discuss it [with you] offline.
	quentin: Do you want that in the minutes?
	jhawk: I could care less.
	mitchb: Do you want *that* in the minutes?
	belmonte: [explanation of the meaning of "could care less" as opposed
		to "couldn't care less"]
	jhawk: Right, I couldn't care less because I only care a little bit.
	mitchb: No, if you couldn't care less then you care the absolute
		least that it is possible for you to care.
	jhawk: Oh, well, I suppose it's unlikely that I'm actually at an
		extreme.

Other Other:

	geofft: \exists freshmen [said as: slash exists freshmen].
	jhawk: IRC sucks.
	someone: That wasn't IRC.
	jhawk: Well, it still sucks.
	[conversation about what language geofft was trying to mimic]
	geofft: I was trying to do Postscript.
	jhawk: Then it would have a backslash.
	geofft: It did; you don't always have to say "back" when you're
		using a backslash.  I know lots of people who say things
		like c-colon-slash-windows-slash-...
	keith: It's like growing up in a Puerto Rico of Puerto Rico.
	mitchb: The people I know who say c-colon-slash-windows-slash-...
		aren't saying it just to shorten the word because they know
		what they mean.  They're the same people who say
		http-colon-backslash-backslash because they think they're
		being smart.

	quentin: Computer Tours and stories would normally be happening next
		week... does anyone know if they're happening?
	geofft: I asked jis, and he says he's interested.
	jhawk: We usually defer it until after Orientation.
	geofft: I'll propose the Wednesday that is the first day of class to
		jis.
	quentin: Did you volunteer to deal with it?
	geofft: I did not.
	[some discussion about tours, and mention of someone thinking that
	price may not think they're worthwhile and may have been thinking of
	skipping them this year]
	mitchb: I think what happened with tours and stories being split
		apart last year was a sad travesty, and that they're both
		great things that a lot of people want to go to, but that
		they've got lots of things going on at the start of term and
		are unwilling to commit two whole evenings to SIPB when it's
		a group they're not yet affiliated with, so they choose one.
		I think they should both happen together.
	quentin: I tend to agree.

The meeting was adjourned at 19:48.


	Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.