Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2009-02-16 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by nelhage. In attendance were Voting members: andersk, broder, fawkes, jesstess, jhamrick, kaduk, neboat, nelhage, price, quentin, ternus | xavid, njess, y_z Associate members: jbarnold, mitchb, wdaher| asedeno, jhawk Prospectives: ccpost, ezyang, iannucci, pweaver | adehnert, avivo Guests: '() Officer Reports: nelhage: Welcome to the SIPB meeting. There are new officers. Congratulations to the old officers. There is a membership election for ezyang at the end of the meeting. broder: In the next few weeks, I plan to implement the now traditional SIPB machine room garbage collection. I will be sending mail about this quickly. Probably after the meeting. *{membership election begins}* nelhage: Edward, stand up. Stand up, introduce yourself. Tell us about yourself, your involvement with SIPB, and what you've been working on. ezyang: Hello, my name's Edward. I'm a freshman living at Random Hall. I first came by during CPW; thought it was intimidating but cool. Middle-to-end of fall term started getting involved. My primary domain of experience is with web application. I'm currently spear-heading Clockworks and I organized the hackathon today. nelhage: Okay, questions for Edward? jhamrick: What is the cluster combo? ezyang: I don't know :-/ nelhage: Well, how would you find out? ezyang: I can "tellme combo" on Athena, I can ask a SIPB member, I can whimper outside the door until someone lets me in. nelhage: SIPB also has cluster cards. price: These are useful for giving to users. broder: Not to mention the puzzle on the whiteboard you could solve. jhawk: What is the base 10 logarithm of the number of power strips we should have around? ezyang: 1.2 jhawk: euwwah! nelhage: This is not including those we have deployed ezyang: Then like .9, but I would err on the side of having more nelhage: Is this supposed to be rounded to the nearest integer? jhawk: oh hell no! nelhage: You thought we were a little intimidating. Do you have any thought on why that is? Whether its a priority for something SIPB should be working on and generally, how can we fix it? ezyang: It's difficult for me to remember exactly what happened. I do have some ideas I formulated after the fact. I've noticed that it takes a long time to get bootstrapped with existing projects. To prevent this we could very specifically figure out small tasks for prospectives to do. Also, small, fun projects like Clockworks which no one is yet depending on, but are really great for new members to code on because they are not as complex as Scripts or XVM ternus: An elderly member walks in with blood dripping off of his hands and says "Can I have a Band-Aid?" What do you do? ezyang: Is their hand drenched in blood? ternus: It's dripping off. ezyang: I don't actually know where SIPB stores band-aids. I would get a paper towel and tell them to wrap it and go to medical immediately. ternus: Look in the monolith. This actually happened. jhawk: an elderly member? ternus: arn jhawk: arn is not a member. If it's actually too much blood for a band-aid or a paper towel you might want to use your shirt as a tourniquet [argument about wisdom of tourniquets] jesstess: Just so people know there are all kinds of things in there that I think rayhe is responsible for -- such as analgesics... jhawk: ...power tools... jesstess: ...so if people come asking for ibuprofen, we totally have that. ternus: For new people here, it is worthwhile to go through the monolith once and see what's in there because there's all sorts of useful stuff. kaduk: There's also cold packs which can come in handy rather frequently. jbarnold: If there's something not there you think SIPB should have ask at a meeting. ternus: It's also worth noting there's a list above meadow of stuff that we give out and you should check that out. broder: I'd like to bring back a couple questions. These are from the 1979, 3rd, quasi-annual SIPB office quiz; we discovered this while we were cleaning the other day. I'd like to remind our contestant that "this is a closed book exam and that no notes, papers, books, tape or disk files may be used". For the first question: "what is the significance of the following: 'applesauce'" ezyang: It's the name of a server. nelhage: Are you going to read the correct response? broder: I don't actually have answers here. My memory of the quiz is that it's the canonical way to find other SIPB members in a crowded area by yelling "applesauce" to which they shall reply "applesauce." jbarnold: His answer is kind of close because it's also a good luck charm in the machine room. ternus: applesauce.mit.edu is 18.152.3.170. [Ed note: not the SIPB subnet, is N42, owner not apparently a member] broder: From the same 1979 quiz, "What do you do in case of fire?" and the tricky part "Why?" ezyang: In the case of fire in the case where we can't actually reasonably deal with it we get the "Save in Case of Fire" box and evacuate the building jhamrick: Where is it? ezyang: We moved it; I think it's there. nelhage: Where it says "HERE!" jhawk: The most important thing you do in the case of a fire is to be safe and to notify the authorities and that means you should pull the pull station and/or dial 100, if you can conveniently do so without risking your life. Also in the event that this path is blocked, there is an alternate exit through the cluster to CAC. ternus: So Edward, remember the cluster combo... it would be a very embarrassing way to die. jbarnold: Just to be clear, the SICOFB is really more of a joke than something you should actually save in case of a fire. If there's a real fire, its more of a hazard to try to haul that box down the stairwell. jhawk: It's a personal judgment call though. Most of the time the fire alarm goes off, you have to decide whether to take the SICOFB without any information as to the severity of the alarm. ezyang: So, usually when the fire alarm goes off there is no fire and we are normally just like this is really annoying. jhawk: Remember that the SICOFB has frisbees. jbarnold: All told, the SICOFB is probably a violation of fire code. It's like on an airplane; you are supposed to leave your personal belongings behind. iannucci: This is not SIPB office airlines, I think we established that. jhawk: What is the purpose of bit 13 in the control configuration register of the 3com 3C509 NIC? ezyang: It's a bad luck charm; when you set it the machine crashes? jhawk: Indicates whether or not an AUI connector is available. kaduk: You may have noticed things hanging in the office Do you have a favorite? and what else would you like to hang? ezyang: I particularly like the umbrella and Mario box. As to something I would hang up myself, I don't think I really have anything like that. [discussion about bell #2] jhamrick: Turn and face the whiteboard and name the office heads. ezyang: I politely decline. jhamrick: Fail! jbarnold: Yes, I encourage that response. [scattered applause] jbarnold: No disrespect for the questioner, right? [rhetorical] nelhage: Okay, so you are sort of a WebDev person by trade which is something SIPB doesn't have a lot of members that do. Do you have any sort of cool ideas for things that SIPB should be investigating to integrate the existing Athena infrastructure that we all love and use so much with the new Web 2.0 world? ezyang: The canonical example of how to do that would be to make a useable web interface for EVERY command line tool you know and love. nelhage: Like which command line tools? ezyang: Like ALL OF THEM. Any tool you use with some regularity should have a nice interface that someone should just click around. nelhage: I mean, like, perl? vi? ezyang: No, things that are more Athena-specific. We have an interface for moira already, for example, right? It kind of isn't the best. It serves for our interface for blanche as well. nelhage: Yea, it is only blanche. It's only for maintaining mailing lists; that's what blanche does. ezyang: Well, yes, technically while you could use just moira, it's much nicer to use blanche. nelhage: What do you mean just moira? It's certainly nicer than speaking the protocol from your hex protocol disassembler. Some people find it more pleasant to use qy which lets you issue raw queries against moira. I'm not sure I understand what you think it's nicer than, it is *the* standard interface for maintaining mailing lists. ezyang: I was under the impression that the webmoira interface was more generic than blanche. mithcb: There are some other web interfaces. hosts.mit.edu lets you do some of the stella stuff, but not quite all of it. quentin: hosts.mit.edu is not accessible to most mortals. jesstess: I think an example, because we get a lot of questions about this is something that makes whichlocker more intuitive because people don't know how to check where things live for their classes... as an example. iannucci: How about AFS? Could you make a tool that allows "non-command-line people" to interact with and set ACL's on a directory? ezyang: You could definitely do that. One thing would be an interactive command line tool but also if we have a web interface that people can use too to remotely administer it. I think people would use that. People use shitty shared hosting file manager web interfaces. Also, I think consolidation is really important. It's really hard to figure out what you need to do what you want; you have to ask and someone will say "Oh this will do what you want it to do," but there isn't a good way of figuring that out by yourself. jbarnold: What's the worst part of computing at MIT? jesstess: [whispered] printing printing printing wdaher: Don't say scripts, though. nelhage: I don't know. It would be pretty interesting watching jbarnold attempt to pretend to not care. jbarnold: Yea, I don't care about scripts... [unconvincing] ezyang: I think MIT does a lot of computing right. And the problems that it does have are not specific to MIT but are of computing in general. It personally annoys me when users aren't willing to do the slightest bit of troubleshooting. nelhage: Do you have any crazy ideas how to fix that? ezyang: No, I'm guilty of it myself; it's much easier to ask someone than troubleshoot it myself. jhawk: A user comes into the office and asks a question that makes no sense to you. How much time do you spend trying to get them to explain the problem before going to the cluster with them? ezyang: I would spend some time, but often it's easier to have a terminal; I've asked for ssh to troubleshoot remote problems before. kaduk: I suggest you answer in the form of a base 2 logarithm of the number of seconds. nelhage: Feel free to ignore Ben. ezyang: 5 minutes. jhawk: Wow that's way too much time. We spend far too much time puttering around the office when we could just as easily solve their problem in 60-90 seconds. price: Another way to speed it up is to get them to log in on one of the office heads. jesstess: Which service is easiest to kill unintentionally? And how would you kill it? ezyang: Scripts, hands down. jesstess: SQL's pretty easy. ternus: I would say the door sensor. jhawk: On scale of 1-10, how would you rate the questions we asked you today? ternus: Please answer in the form of a logarithm. jbarnold: Its a pretty regular tradition to complain about quality of the questioning. jhawk: I don't remember asking them to evaluate it. nelhage: You've asked this specific question before. ezyang: 7-ish. kaduk: I move that jbarnold asks the question. jbarnold: Oh no! I'm not... OH NO! It's actually legitimate this time. nelhage: Second. jbarnold: I need to stop coming. ... [asks the question over-dramatically] mitchb: Do you want us to like turn the lights off and put shadow lights on your face? jbarnold: That was kind of a Shatner thing. ternus: And add lightning outside the window. nelhage: Anyway, the question. ezyang: I am slightly ashamed to say at the very beginning, it was because I thought a permanent Athena account would be really cool. Right now, though, its more because SIPB is really like a second home to me. [office: AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW] ezyang: I love Random too! It's my first home. jhawk: Remember these minutes will be on the Internet; your parents may see them. price: That's his zeroeth home. jhawk: So complimentary. nelhage: I strongly object to the term zeroeth. [digression about zero-indexed arrays and the road to madness] *closed session begins* *closed session ends* <14-0-2 ezyang is elected> nelhage: Congratulations, Edward. The meeting is not over yet. The remainder is to go through these piles of stuff. *{membership election ends}* fawkes: During the meeting, I updated the various mailing lists; the new officers and EC are now moira official. SIPB Projects Report: ezyang: Clockworks will NOT have a working prototype at the end of this hackathon. However, we have debugged a major bug with our Scripts deploy. nelhage: Just be glad your subversion repo didn't corrupt itself, half-way through, deleting all your history. Thats what happened last time I attempted to do a day-long, nothing- to-working prototype hackathon. nelhage: There was a SIPB hackathon today in which they hacked on Clockworks. I did some small improvements to barnowl for IRC and support for not-zephyr in hopes of eventually throwing it at freshmeat, slashdot or something; with the aim of trying to get some non-MIT users. price: XVM on Saturday upgraded the firmware on our RAID. Nothing of value changed. broder: On Sunday, aperture-science spontaneously rebooted. As far as we can tell it was for absolutely no reason. iannucci: Some improvements to the way XVM quotas are handled fawkes: There was an initial meeting about the 40th reunion. Discussed date and general plans. Plan to allocate for around $1000 for reunion. jbarnold: How much was spent last time? fawkes: It's unclear. There was an initial allocation of $400, but there was $500 at a later date and it's unclear if that supplemented or replaced the original allocation. kaduk: There is at least $500 of verified expenditure from the 35th reunion. jbarnold: Sounds low to me. nehage: Do you want to go ahead and move now? fawkes: Sure, I move to allocate $1000 for the SIPB 40th reunion. jhawk: When was this going to be? fawkes: The current plan is to follow the 35th and do it the weekend two after commencement, one after alumni weekend. jhawk: So June? Still in this fiscal year? fawkes: Yes. We basically want to do what they did last time. I need to talk to CAC about reserving Kresge pits before I can firmly set a date. jesstess: Many people leave for the summer; this is a problem. It would be a shame if current members can't make it. nelhage: straw poll: How many people will NOT be around this summer? 0 How many people know they will be around? 8 How many people have no idea if they'll be here? 6 fawkes: If Clockworks was done we could use it to find the dates ^_^ ezyang: [not amused]. It won't actually work for that case anyway. broder: Even if reunion moves, allocate now. We can deallocate later. jbarnold: I think we should (in)formally set aside but not allocate it so that it's not yet spendable before the board hears more concrete plans. fawkes: Okay, that's fine with me. Office Report: nelhage: SIPB office? jhamrick: yay! [laughter] nelhage: We have a new office tsaritsa and she has a report. jhamrick: Yesterday, if you hadn't noticed, we reorganized the office a little bit. There are several piles of stuff. The changes are pretty obvious, but basically we moved the monolith and some file cabinets and bookshelves. We were gonna do more but we ran out of time. broder: We also cleaned up the cables drawer. price: Also, everyone should know that the food items drawers are changed. jhamrick: Yes there are now 4: a napkins and tea(?) drawer, a candy drawer, the silverware and bags drawer, and plates and cups. ternus: More relevantly, the Save In Case of Fire Box moved [to the other wall]. So if you need to save something in case of fire, that's where to look. nelhage: The swap drawer has been temporarily deallocated, but will be restored after more drawer rearranging. jhamrick: I will be going through and pruning drawers. If you don't use your drawer any longer or don't have a drawer and want one send me an email, NOT a zephyr, and I'll take care of it. nelhage: The other product of office cleanup was the piles and piles of carnage that we will deal with at the end of the meeting. jhamrick: I would like to allocate for filing cabinet wheels. jhawk: Furniture dollies? They average about $25 each. Previously wheels were obtained for one cabinet so we could access the air conditioner. The others are less urgent and I'd think you could just get a cart from CAC. jhamrick: Yea. We have six cabinets. I move to allocate for $120 for four furniture dollies. quentin: I move to amend for $200 so we can do it for all of them. nelhage: So amended. jhawk: This is getting to be almost real money. How much do we have left? kaduk: $200 less than last time. Around $5.5k. jbarnold: Is someone going to deal with these right away or are they going to sit in a drawer? jhamrick: I'll handle them ASAP. Within a month or two at most. jhamrick: We realized we didn't have many velcro cable ties. ccpost gave us about 100, but we should get more for the office and to pay him back for what he gave us. About 1000? nelhage: Seems overkill? I like 100. We still have a number of Chris's left, let's just pay him back. Let's go for $30 broder: I would like to move to allocate up to $10 to buy a two-to-three-foot coaxial cable to connect the LAMP TV to the back wall because we are currently using a 50-foot cable. quentin: MIT Cable gives out free cables. Any length you want. broder: As long as we get one. I'd rather make sure it gets done even if we have to spend money on it. quentin: I'll take responsibility for getting it. *{here begins "dealing with the carnage"}* price: The historically interesting book pile: * ARPANet protocol handbook and directory * final report of MULTICS kernel design project * 3 distinct reports on _THE_ internet worm - the SIPB office factors strongly in the "Microscope and tweezers" nelhage: They describe pulling an all nighter in the office analyzing it. * the long lost office manual. * Binder from when we maintained terminals. * stacks of SIPB minutes - Be glad we didn't keep doing this. * variety of MIT history: o Underground guides o Freshman picture books o Old directories, o HowToGAMIT 1.5 from 1970 * LISP Manual, preliminary edition, signed. nelhage: The couch has yet further interesting things. Huge pile of random academic stuff, things that have no visual connection to SIPB. Old computer manuals with no obvious historic content. I'll send mail about most of these later. nelhage: Beginning to get rid of the throw-away pile and these computers. Will work as a rolling white ballot. [Ed note: unless objections shown, disposed by white ballot] [crufty PS/2 ball mice, 6 opteron heat-sinks and fans, a whole bunch of cables, replicated or obsolete.] [old dubious multimeter written "I suck. Don't use me ~ctl".] [whole bunch of keyboards. Number of old suns. 3 Kinesis keyboards.] [manuals for VCRs and TVs no longer in the office] [milquetoast which is believed to be cursed.] jhawk: milquetoast has a DVD-RW we should save. [TMI, the pencil sharpener.] [more cables. mystery motherboard] [old techs, mousepads, various SCISI terminators] mitchb: retaining 1 shiny pad for Sun mice [pair of zip drives, pair of crappy speakers. Power adaptor.] [2 monitors. one 15", one 19"] jhawk: functionality? nelhage: work I think. [ box for some IDE enclosure. Mounting hardware for UPS.] [ bag full of misc compnents. Quite a few motors.] [minor EE stuff that could be replaced for walk to 38] quentin: someone should sort broder: I'll do it. [bezel kits for UPS. Netgear gigabit PCI NIC. got 8 for free] mithcb: why are we tossing this? nelhage: We have 5 in machine room. better for person than office [A bunch of crufty software boxes, will save CDs: Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4. Partition Magic 6.0. Virtual PC. Adobe CS(1). Office 98, mac edition] [Still more power strips.] jhawk: I object based on Edward's number. I like to have to give away. quentin: I would like to have a period of SIPB-reuse before reuse@ broder: For the sake of cleanliness, I would like short time. By Wednesday. nelhage: bigger peices of hardware. Bigger of our two CD players jhawk: I object ... it has bigger buttons. We can crossfade, etc. broder: DJ jhawk objects nelhage: stereo cassette deck. floppy drive. 5 1/4 & 3 1/2 combo floppy-drive broder: that's awesome. ... that is not an objection asedeno: I do object; we should have a 5 1/4 drive. nelhage: vanilla CD drive mitchb: We should only keep the chocolate ones. nelhage: 3 machines. Nethack.mit.edu - HDD is dead. Maintainers have no interest in reviving it. It's already deactivated. mitchb: It's my new toy. nelhage: snork.mit.edu quentin: has data people might care about nelhage: We'll recover or destroy data as the owners desire first. nelhage: xcb and hodge-podge. nelhage: I move to get rid of these. Evan and I will handle deactivation, etc. nelhage: Okay, contested pile: SGI O2, was oliver at some point. I've never seen it turned on. quentin: I'd like to see if it works. I think SIPB should have an example of Athena. nelhage: Let's get rid of it. nelhage: the CD player jhawk: If stacked it doesn't take more space. I have sentimental connection. It's nice to be able to cross-fade, etc. mitchb: I don't see its utility, but if it's agreed that it's not taking up otherwise usable space and someone would be sad to see it go, we should keep it. broder: motion to dispose nelhage: max the vt100, nonfunctional quentin: We fixed it. I think it's significant. nelhage: It takes up a significant amount of space. ternus: 2 members' drawers worth fawkes: According to jtu, it excited crufty alumni at the 35th reunion. nelhage: I move to get rid of it. broder: I amend that we look for academic interest. quentin: I amend that we keep it until the reunion. nelhage: 3 1/2, 5 1/4 combo drive broder: move to keep nelhage: 4 disgusting looking power strips mitchb: Can't we get rid of them and buy new ones as appropriate? nelhage: I move to punt. nelhage: DVD-RW from milquetoast [there are 4 others in the office] nelhage: I move to get rid of it. jhawk: I think it is useful and we could put it in another machine. ezyang: I echo the sentiment. nelhage: Do either of you plan to put in another head? [ezyang volunteers to put in yaz soon] nelhage: KVM cables. nelhage: mac hyperdrive utilities [no one knows] quentin: These are various serial cables and adaptors that I think we should move to the machine room. broder: I object on grounds of cluttering the machine room. mitchb: There are boxes in the machine room for this purpose; we should fill them. [more discussion... ] [decided that they are going to machine room. Evan will organize and deal with later] nelhage: 2 power adapters with unknown devices quentin: It's poor practice to punt unknown power adapters when there are devices with missing adapters. I will try to match them. nelhage: Disposing of SCSI cables based on broder's conversation with maintainers that say we don't need them. We have some more in machine room. nelhage: 2 model-M's (keyboards) asedeno: Some keys do not work. I have used to replace key caps. quentin: magic UPS serial cables. jhawk: we have like 5 more nelhage: PS/2 Model-M adapter nelhage: flash card reader broder: We have multiple multi card readers. nelhage: SCSI sniffer jhawk: lights LEDs nelhage: MAC monitor (before 1997) -> VGA adapter. Punt? quentin: objects. There's a machine in the machine room. nelhage: audio cable. They are useful. broder: We have at least 6 more. Oh well, just keep 'em. nelhage: some PS/2 adapter asedeno: We have two. nelhage: A sun AUI cable [Sun micro-AUI -> AUI for Sparc 5s, etc.] jhawk: Mitch, your new Sun doesn't need [the AUI cable], does it? mitchb: I don't think so. fawkes: I've never heard of AUI. mitchb: Donald will love this. "I hear that if you need AUI, the RCCs have a stock of AUI stuff they can give out." nelhage: What's this? quentin: It's a ground lift adapter... jhawk: No, it's a European to US. quentin: But it could also be used as a ground lift adapter. nelhage/jhawk: EUWAHW! broder: Eww. quentin: I have one of those already. nelhage: I move to punt it strictly on the suggestion it be used as that. broder: I strongly second such a motion. nelhage: Does John have a comment? jhawk: John does not have a comment. nelhage: VGA->RGB adapter jhawk: Without sync? broder: Is this redundant since we have a 5 connector? nelhage: no nelhage: The last item is the abacus. price: It has logarithms on it. jhawk: Historically referred to as the SIPB coprocessor, the abacus is quaint, cute, and amusing. It is friendly to share with people and play with on occasion. It takes up very little space in its vertical profile and I can't imagine SIPB would get rid of its coprocessor. broder: I think that's the most eloquent argument I've heard, so I would like to keep it on the basis of that. mitchb: Yeah, I would like to know where you just quoted from. [multiple calls for white ballot] nelhage: [without recognizing motions] We are keeping the coprocessor. nelhage: I believe that is everything. *{here ends "dealing with the carnage"}* nelhage: summary: Everything on back table is SIPB-reuse, mail to follow. Things under table need to be deactivated. Books on side table keeping. Things on couch are to be discussed per price's email. Will be discussed next week. Other: price: I get to sit down. nelhage: Man. ... I'll be jealous in half an hour. Other Other: jhamrick: Our tablet is purple! nelhage: There is a lot of wanking going on elsewhere on campus. broder: I wonder who will get out first tonight. jesstess: We will or I will have to hurt all of you. broder: I agree with the sentiment. [Ed: the following zephyr was sent later during the closed portion of the meeting during ezyang's election: > Instance: oq Time: Mon Feb 16 20:13:55 2009 Host: BYTE-ME.MIT.EDU > From: Bus Error: Passengers Dumped > > [oq'd during closed meeting with permission] > njess walks in > broder: Wait, you guys are done? > njess: Yeah. > broder: Fuck you! ] The meeting was adjourned at 21:18:57. Minutes taken and submitted by fawkes.