Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of August 30, 2010 The meeting was called to order at 19:30:00 by jhamrick. In attendance were Voting members: kaduk davidben ezyang gdb afarrell geofft dwilson neboat lizdenys jhamrick quentin | aseering rishig adehnert pweaver Associate members: asedeno tlyu belmonte jhawk awozniak | srz Prospectives: wings broglek djbclark | rye Guests: Brandon Sorbom | steb Officer Reports: jhamrick: This Friday is the Midway, and you guys should come out and help. I'm going to send e-mail, but it's 4-6:30. quentin: Setup can start at 2. lizdenys: But realistically it won't be more than half an hour. jhamrick: I can't be here until 3:30 because I have pika work week. lizdenys: There's going to be a grumpy fuzzball cake. It's going to be huge, and a grumpy fuzzball, and a cake, but it'll only be there for the Midway, so if you're not incentivized enough to hang out with the lovely freshmen, there will be cake for you and the freshmen. awozniak: Post photos? jhamrick: I'll have my camera. jhamrick: Remind everyone that as freshmen come in and we want to prospectivize them, acoording to the proposal we voted in in the spring, we'll add them to our interested list so they're on our mailing list, and if they come back we can then make them a prospective. geofft: The "prospectivize" script seems to be adding people to the "Interested" section of the file. Also, perhaps we want a ... "interestedize" script? SIPB Projects Report: kaduk: The project to get OpenAFS usable on FreeBSD has made substantial headway. I can now complete an entire rebuild of the operating system in AFS. Along the way I discovered a bug in the 'ar' utility: it has a hardcoded limit of 6 digits in the user ID, so if you're using a daemon.* principal in AFS, you... lose. afarrell: *stands up* IAP is sooner than you think! If you're interested in teaching a class, talk to me. If you're not, think about what kind of class you want to be teaching. I'm also looking for someone to help me in organizing the classes, particularly in videotaping for those teachers who want their classes recorded. davidben: Pending review, you will soon be able to search in the little popup thing in barnowl. : Ooooh! rishig: Hackathon on September 11: leonidg and I are looking for someone who wants to develop a small AI game like 6.370 or much simpler, that you could code for it during the hackathon or spend an houre or two writing an AI. Another idea, if you're interested in writing puzzles, is having a Project Euler like thing where every hour we release 3-4 puzzles, and frosh who are not on a project can work together. Either math questions, or "we have a server with a bug, find the bug", or... this depends on you expertise and what you like writing, but come talk to me. ezyang: I'm working on a presentation for scripts.mit.edu, so I want to open this question to all of you: What about scripts do you find cool? So, you might be thinking "Shared hosting, that's about the most uncool thing," but I want you to think about, have you ever done something on scripts and found "Wow, that was really easy!"? I would love to hear your story. wings: Three things: one, stories and tours will take place on September 16 starting at 6:45. That gives us time to do W20 machine room tours beforehand if we want to. Cluedumps -- I sent out some e-mail earlier, but will send more to cluedump-announce, so add yourself to that list if you're interested. So far we have five speakers; if you want to speak you are welcome to. Poster -- we still haven't gotten the dimensions on that yet. Depending on the size of that poster either Technique or CopyTech will be the cheapest option. lizdenys: Is the space blocked? I haven't seen it. geofft: I think it's still blocked. I think that postering space will be back soon, and that re-assignments (the dimensions) will be out in a day or two. adehnert: My impression is that postering itself will not be possible until Friday. geofft: The Athena clusters upgraded over the weekend to Debathena on Ubuntu Lucid, and also switched from 32-bit to 64-bit. The auto-upgrade mostly worked, except in those networks that physically can't have more than three machines at once installing Ubuntu. Mark Silis said he would see if he could dig up some only-kinda-crappy switches that are drop-in replacements for the totally-crappy ones, as a stopgap measure. If you maintain locker software, or similar, it would be worth checking to make sure your software works on a cluster machine or test.dialup. You may want to recompile it for 64-bit. davidben: Revision 57623 or later of Chromium can finally start with an AFS home directory. ezyang: Is this your fault? davidben: It is my fault! It took a long time. The code is disgusting because all kinds of locking things get involved and POSIX is special. geofft: You worked for Chromium over the summer, right? davidben: I worked on client-side certificates, which will also be landing in a release or two. ezyang: I'll pitch in for Greg: the W91 migration is happening, and machines are being moved. The ideal move time is 6am to 6pm. You can do it outside but it's not as good. Just phone up DOST and move your machines! jhamrick: Linerva had an outage yesterday, and had another outage only a few days before that, which sucked. We're trying to figure out why we had two outages in such short succession, so please bear with us. Office Report: lizdenys: There are freshmen here. This is the office. They might pop around and see the office. If you're doing things like taking phone calls for a job interview, try to do that somewhere else, for the next few days. Obviously be welcoming to freshmen, give them the normal SIPB spiel, etc. jhamrick: Yeah, around this time, if you're the only person in the office, you should make sure you can talk to freshmen. If you're really busy trying to finish a project, maybe you shouldn't be in the office. ezyang: On the other hand we would love to keep the office open! jhamrick: Maybe zephyr -c sipb and say "Please come help me keep the office open!". Other: '() Other Other: djbclark: It turns out that when people at Metropolitan Storage Warehouse say "Oh, it never gets too hot in here", they are completely lying, so some of the candy might be in less than optimal state. : [sad noises] ezyang: I've always noted that melted candy loses the nice texture but still tastes good. jhamrick: Sometimes it's more fun 'cause you can lick it off your fingers. djbclark: It's a feature, not a bug! jhamrick: It's nice to see so many faces back in the room. I think this is the fullest this room has been since May or June. afarrell: There are new Kindles around, and they're pretty shiny, and black. awozniak: Someone should mess around with the Ninja Badge. If people want to mess around with the radio link? broglek: Bring in another! I've been having battle withdrawal. ezyang: For those of us who don't know what's going on... jhamrick: At DEF CON, Ninja Networks made these ninja badges, and Woz was the head of the hardware for that. If you turn it on, you have your own personal ninja that you can fight other ninja with and level up. awozniak: In the spirit of hardware hacking, I have some more [rattles off a list hardware parts]. geofft: If that is important for the minutes can you let me know those numbers later? awozniak: It's on the back of the badge. jhamrick: There's a box on the gadget shelf with a booklet. The meeting was adjourned at 19:43:45. Minutes taken and submitted by geofft.