Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2012-01-23


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

In attendance were
        Voting members: ezyang iannucci kaduk bbaren achernya dwilson ine

        Associate members: mats_a quentin tlyu jhawk

        Prospectives: steb lapentab dennison

        Guests: 

Administrivia
=============

jhawk: Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth is here.

jhawk: Adobe licensing got renewed.

kaduk: If you need to get reimbursed for SIPB expenses, such as hackathon expenses,
please remember to send email to sipb-treasurer.

Project Updates
===============

jhamrick: Gutenbach had a hackathon this weekend, it went pretty well. We didn't
get a new version out though, I guess that was optimistic. There is still work to
be done.

ine: Some confusion on Friday on a start date for Debian trainees class.
I submitted a request, and I thought we had gotten everything, but in
fact it had been amended an hour later.  There was an issue tonight,
where some people showed up at the Haskell class, expecting it to be C.
(I think it's a good idea that they were exposed to Haskell but...) The
other thing is the SIPB calendar and SIPB page should be in sync.  I'm
hoping to go over the events, and hope that there is some review
process, so people can check it before it goes online.

achernya: Last week I said that Scripts said they would add two new servers to the
pool. Unfortunately, they didn't get security audited, so hopefully that
will happen this week.

ezyang: This week, exploits for a local user escalation vulnerability in
Linux 2.6.29+ became public.  The vulnerability was a special file used
for writing memory did not properly enforce access permissions. Anyone
who is running a public dialup is encouraged to take appropriate
precautions. [quentin: Cough Ksplice.] [bbaren: Are fixes published?]
[achernya: Yes. Also, Redhat sucks: they wrote an exploit detection script
that always returns "yes". nelhage wrote a C script that was a better
version, but it was quick and dirty so we don't know if it's publically
available.] [jhawk: C script?] [achernya: It doesn't deserve to be
called a program.  The official "fix" was silly: run a systemtap script.
New kernels are not vulnerable.]

Other
=====

mats_a: This is a personal project. I got a giant monitor, and a lenticular sheet,
and attempted to make a 3D monitor. The result was so-so; you could barely see
3D, there was chromatic aberration. DPI didn't line up, so I wrote a subpixel renderer.

dwilson: ASA is moving to a new database, which went live less than an hour ago.
I have mostly transitioned SIPB's information to the new database.

Other Other
==========

mats_a: Apparently if you have a touchscreen on Linux in a dual-screen setup, the
solution is an affine transform in xorg.conf.
[ezyang: Didn't they get rid of that?] [achernya: You can still use it, but most distros
have it automatically figured out by udev now.]

meeting adjourned at 19:36.

        Minutes taken and submitted by ezyang.