Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2009-01-26 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: kaduk, xavid, broder, mitchb, neboat, price, jesstess, jhawk | quentin, ctl Associate members: belmonte | kcr Prospectives: biyeun, jhamrick, pbaranay, s4m | dnawi Guests: Officer Reports: price: At the end of the meeting, we have elections for jhamrick and biyeun. kaduk: I've run some numbers. Of our ~$11,000 useable budget for the year, we've spent about $3,800 and allocated about an additional $1,000, leaving us with about $6,000 unallocated, so we can buy things. price: Sounds good for mid-year. price: Okay, stand up, and we'll ask questions for a while. Tell us what you've been doing at SIPB. jhamrick: I've been spending a lot of time in the office. Lately I started a project called Dodona, which is a zephyrbot that answers technical questions. I'm not so much a systems person, so I wanted to do something that incorporates my interests into a project. biyeun: I've been hanging around the office too, recently worked on the SIPB website, and want to work on other websites like XVM and Scripts. My goal is to make SIPB more accessible to general users. jhawk: A user comes in and asks you for a random number. biyeun and jhamrick in unison: 8! [everyone else]: *boggle* neboat: If I ask the same question... do you both say 5? biyeun: 24. jhamrick: 11. neboat: Okay, so it's not the cluster combo. price: A user comes in and asks to borrow the holepunch to use in the reading room. jhamrick: Sorry, you can't take it out of the office. You can bring your stuff in here, though. jesstess: Trade off. You are a secret admirer or stalker on Athena. You want to send messages to the object of your affection using Athena. Think about that and give us some interesting ways you can do this. An example would be to spoof zephyr. jhamrick: That's easiest; you can spoof the name in your zsig. You can use a zephyrbot. biyeun: Not sure... jhamrick: You can go get a new Kerberos principal. biyeun: Hijack quentin's computer while he's logged in. jhawk: A user comes in and reports being stalked on Athena. jhamrick: Ask if they know who's stalking them? jhawk: No, but they think it might be some chick named Jessica. jhamrick: I'd tell them there are other girls named Jessica who do zephyr. biyeun: I can't really do that for Biyeun. If they're really concerned, they can report it to IS&T. jhawk: Okay, how do they do that? biyeun: E-mail Accounts? jhawk: That's effective, but maybe not the recommended choice. Athena and IS&T take this sort of thing very seriously, and can be reached at stopit@mit.edu. You can ask how they're being contacted, and can tell them that they can also talk to their advisor, the deans, etc. (basically anyone they're comfortable talking with). price: You're in the office. It's getting to be late at night... or 3 in the afternoon. mitchb: That's kind of late at night for me. price: You're the last member here, but there are a couple of prospectives still around. What are the options you have open to you? jhamrick: You could allow them to stay. price: What do you have to tell them to do then? jhamrick: Lock the door, turn off the lights, etc. if they leave. price: The office is in their hands. You need to communicate explicitly that you're leaving the office in their hands and they must be comfortable with that. jhawk: If you did that, do you think you'd be breaking, bending, or upholding a rule? jhamrick: If it's like their second time at SIPB, you'd be breaking a rule. If it's someone who's been at SIPB a lot and most of the members know and trust, then it'd be more like upholding a rule since it's important to have the office open as much as possible. price: They also need to be comfortable with being able to handle the situation if someone shows up and... isn't being nice, and know that they can ask this person to leave. jesstess: Ask the other person a question you think they can't answer (on a technical topic). jhamrick: Name the range of 3 8-bit private network addresses. biyeun: 169.254... jhawk: [wankage about Class C addresses] biyeun: Define the relationship between focal length and the diagonal of the film for a long lens. jhamrick: Uh... mitchb: I'd go with 10.0.0.0. biyeun: It's longer. kcr: jhamrick, these private networks you mentioned... where are they defined? jhamrick: Wikipedia. [everyone else]: *uproarious laughter* jhawk: RFC 1918. xavid: Name your favorite SIPB projects that you don't work on yourself, and why are they your favorite? biyeun: I'd like to work on XVM; I use it a lot because I work with a lot of groups that require servers. jhamrick: sipbmp3 because I like being able to listen to music on the speakers in the office and do it all from my laptop. kaduk: Name as many SIPB office heads as you can. jhamrick/biyeun alternating: yaz-pistachio, mega-man, bobbi-harlow, coleco-sidewinder, opus, binkley, portnoy, cutter-john, zsr, deathtongue, bart-savagewood price: Which of those have a monitor? mitchb: It varies day-to-day. price: deathtongue and bart share a monitor over there. Also, there's one where jhawk is sitting... jhamrick: kid-icarus. price: And one where jesstess is sitting. jesstess: He's a poor boy. jhamrick: Oliver. belmonte: This actually happened. You're sitting in the office. There aren't a lot of other people here. Suddenly there's a lot of water gushing in through the ceiling. What do you do? biyeun: Unplug the power strips. jhawk: That's actually wrong; you'll get shocked. biyeun: Flip all the breakers. Notify facilities. jhawk: At what number, or how do you determine the number? biyeun: Go to one of the phones out there. jhawk: Which phones? mitchb: I think it's clear she means the only phone out in the 5th floor lounge. jhawk: Oh, right, because there's only one there now. You can call x3-1500, or tell CAC, or pull the fire alarm if it's an emergency, or call 100. quentin: This is what they're talking about. [shows picture of the flood] jhawk: I made the mistake of touching the water. mitchb: You seem to have a lot of accidents with electricity. jhawk: It was just a light tingle; my hair didn't change. mitchb: But it started out frizzy! jhawk: Describe your relationship with Wikipedia. jesstess: [to jhawk] Maybe you should describe *your* relationship with Wikipedia. jhawk: I can do so afterwards. biyeun: If I wanted to look up something that didn't require knowing complete factual information, I'd use Wikipedia. But for more serious things, I'd consult other resources. jhamrick: Wikipedia is usually my first place to go when I need to look something up. I'll look for the links on the bottom. If that fails me, I'm sad. jhawk: jbarnold forced me to make a change to an article when I was reading about the Hall Effect, and since then I feel compelled to edit whenever I see something wrong... which is all the time. xavid: And how often do those changes get reverted? jhawk: Oh, almost never. kcr: What's the significance of applesauce in the context of SIPB? jhamrick: In an LSC movie, a SIPB member would shout "applesauce!" and SIPB members would be able to find each other. And there's a jar of applesauce in the machine room. kcr: The theory is you yell "applesauce!" and the other SIPB members will respond "applesauce!" and you keep doing this in the hopes that you rendezvous before the rest of the crowd mauls you. kaduk: What would you like to see in the SIPB office that is not here right now and that you don't know about? This could be new audio supplies, etc. jhamrick: A new couch, a blanket that can be washed, pillows. jesstess: 'Cause we want to make it easier for geofft to pass out whenever he wants to? biyeun: Macbook power adapters? belmonte: Returning to the subject of the sofa... at various points in SIPB's history, it has been either a foldout model or a non-foldout model. Briefly discuss the pros and cons of these... kcr: Friendly amendment to add a loft to the list of options. biyeun: If we got a loft, geofft would permanently occupy it, but that would be good since we'd have more space for other people. jhamrick: A foldout would be bad; it would block Laptop Land. biyeun: It would also be awkward because you'd potentially end up lying down next to someone else. [discussion about whether the current couch folds out] biyeun: We should get a loft. jhamrick: I second that. price: How do you feel SIPB does in bringing new people in, and what do you think it can do better? jhamrick: I may have had an easier time coming in than other people do because I already knew three or four people. It helps if you can come in and sit next to people you know and be like "hi, it's my first time here." It's hard for people who are shy. price: What do you think we can do to change that? jhamrick: It might be nice to have a sort of Introduction to SIPB Day like what we do during rush, but more interactive, and people can come in and learn about projects and get introduced. I remember people asking what I wanted to do, which was nice, but it would have been better if there were people saying "okay, come sit down here and we'll show you around the project." biyeun: We need better advertising... it's sort of nonexistent and most people learn of SIPB's existence through other people, like I found out about it from Quentin. jhamrick: Right, Student Info Processing Board... it sounds like some advocacy group or something. jhawk: This was uninfluenced by price's question. Someone comes in and says "I want to be a prospective!" biyeun: Ask about their interests, tell them about our current projects, etc. jhamrick: Encourage them to hang out in the office and come to meetings. jhawk: Anything else specific? jhamrick: They should be subscribed to the mailing lists. jhawk: And how does that work? jhamrick: Ask him *points at quentin* jhawk: He's not here. jhamrick: E-mail him? jhawk: There's a spiel, etc. [wankage about whether "spiel" is the official name, the pseudo official name, or just the file name] jhawk: Tell them that the job of SIPB is to FTGOS. What does FTGOS mean? biyeun: Further the Goals of SIPB. kcr: [something blurred by a yawn] jhawk: Translate kcr. jhamrick: "I hate everything"? [everyone]: *applause* price: The file is /afs/sipb/admin/office/spiel.txt kcr: SIPB has a members-only Sun dialup. I'm guessing you know what it's called. Tell me about what it's named after and what its significance is to SIPB. price: First, what's it called? jhawk: *throws Honeywell Multics frisbee to jhamrick* jesstess: So, what's the name of it? jhamrick: Honeywell? kcr: What was SIPB originally for? biyeun: Wasn't multics the network computer, terminal heads, etc. jhamrick: To improve knowledge about computers, etc.? biyeun: To help manage multics? kcr: Multics was MIT's main mainframe back when there was only one or two. Information Processing (the IS&T equivalent) charged for time. We had a bunch of funny-money that we doled out to students so they could do their computing. jhawk: I'd like to read into the record some poetry from the folder labelled "A Child's Garden of Multics," from the subfolder labelled "Multics Poetry": On the Twelfth day of Multics My true love sent to me Twelve analysts twitching, Eleven options stitching, Ten stacks a-popping, Nine aids debugging, Eight tapes attaching, Seven DIM's a-dimming, Six ITS a-pointing, Five protection rings, Four calling sequences, Three link pairs, Two system dumps, And a file tree hierarchy. kaduk: Name as many SIPB servers as you can. biyeun/jhamrick: better-mousetrap, linerva, captain-crunch, multics, torchwood-institute, aperture-science price and others: [name more servers] kcr: Is there anyone in here you don't know? And if so, name them. jhamrick: *points at ctl* Guy with red shirt and grey sweater. jhawk: Doesn't fit in 8 characters. mitchb: Taking a shorter name has never been a problem for him. biyeun: *points at s4m* Guy at portnoy... blue sweater man. mitchb: So uncreative! s4m: Especially since I'm not wearing a sweater. kcr: I move that jhawk ask the question. jhawk: [does so] biyeun: I really like the atmosphere in the office, have been hanging out a lot, it's really nice. I want to improve the accessibility of SIPB to people outside of SIPB, mostly through work on the web so people can see more about what we do, who we are, etc. jhamrick: I think SIPB is a great organization. The people here are awesome. As a whole, the combined knowledge is really cool. I really like the projects. I'm not necessarily very helpful with many of them, but it would be nice if in time I could help work on some other ones. I'd also really like to see more things that are very... it seems like SIPB does a lot of things oriented towards people who use computers already. It'd be nice to see more things that non-computer people use that help with computing. <13-0-0 - jhamrick is membered> <13-0-0 - biyeun is membered> SIPB Projects Report: jesstess: I want to thank xavid for doing a wonderful job with IAP. I helped some, but he did most of it. We had amazing turnout this year across the board. price: The posters helped get visibility, too. jhamrick: Dodona is running on -c dodona. You can talk to it... very simplistically. price: linerva rebooted Thursday night. It was very sad. It had been up for like 9 months. jhawk: [multics uptime:] 386 days. broder: Debathena last night deployed the new version of pyhesiodfs, allowing each person to see their own view of /mit, so users can now mount things directly via ln as opposed to just using the automounter. This is total abuse of the VFS layer, and is kind of awesome. Office Report: broder: As part of my IAP Python class, I was approached by a community representative of O'Reilly asking if we wanted to participate in a program where we get free books. So, I've asked Greg to sign us up. The list is sipb-books; you should be able to add yourself. I should get back to them soon with some initial books, so if you have particular ones you want, e-mail me. jhawk: Is this distinct from their book review program? broder: They also throw books at us for no reason. Other: kaduk: Cokecomm has more candy, but I don't see soda yet. Other Other: pbaranay: The Guild is running a 10-day, which is taking up my life... and geofft's. The meeting was adjourned at 20:46. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.