========================================================= NOTE: These are DRAFT minutes until this note is removed. ========================================================= Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2014-05-19 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by dove. In attendance were Voting members: cereslee codetaku dove dvorak42 dwilson k_sunter phurst tboning | btidor Associate members: achernya bbaren glasgall Prospectives: dzaefn jrafidi sparrow_ tthoma24 Guests: Administrivia: dove: There will be an election for jogama at the end of the meeting tonight. bbaren: I move that the board allocate $170 to purchase the 5-volume Knuth Computers and Typesetting set: it includes the TeX book, the Metafont book, literate program sources for TeX and Metafont, and the Metafont sources for Computer Modern in literate form. SIPB Projects Report: jrafidi: Roost 2 is looking more and more like a usable application; you can make and delete panes and I don't think it leaks memory! I made a non-working compose widget and updated some CSS stuff. There's also a button to jump to the bottom. glasgall: SIPB's own kcr has released the first text-mode client for Roost; he's been calling it snipe, and it's on his Github. glasgall: The term is nearly over, and with that comes the beginning of maintenance season. XVM will be evacuating the crashy raid sometime after term ends, so let's say around the middle to end of next week. It's possible your VM will be paused while we move it; you will lose open TCP connections and possibly zephyr subs, but you won't lose most state. tthoma24: Is it helpful to suspend them in advance. glasgall: Doesn't make a difference. dvorak42: Hopefully sometime this summer we'll be doing the SMR rewire take 2. The e-mail will go out to sipb-machine-room@ this week. jrafidi: How does zephyr filtering work at all? achernya: Client-side. glasgall: Look at BarnOwl's filter language. achernya: Don't, build something better. bbaren: Let's look at this offline. New Prospective Introductions: Other: glasgall: SIPB's own dwilson defended his thesis today. keithw also successfully defended his. phurst: Is this the most SIPB members with last names starting with W that are graduating and getting PhD's in a while? tthoma24: John Charles, the VP of IS&T, put out a survey; it lacks feedback because it's boring and it didn't go to a lot of students. tboning: As of last Tuesday, there were 3 student responses. sparrow_: I think it's up to 4 or 5. tthoma24: Other Other: achernya: At SIPB it's normal to run ssh in a loop to update your servers. I felt dirty doing that at work. bbaren: How many servers? achernya: Too many. Membership Election for jogama: dove: Tell us a little bit about yourself. jogama: I'm Jonathan; I declared 6-2 and am just a freshman here interested in robotics and random computer stuff. OpenHatch was my main project; I organized an event in which anyone at MIT was able to come over and learn how to contribute to open source. Some people from BU came as well. I think about 20-35 people came total over the 2 days the event ran. tboning: Do you have any idea how many lines of code were contribetud? jogama: No. bbaren: What was the gender ratio like? jogama: It wasn't that bad; by memory, I would wager 5-7:1. achernya: We have many things hanging from the ceiling. What do you think should be on the ceiling that isn't? glasgall: Friendly amendment: what shouldn't be on the ceiling that is? jogama: We could put a clock over here so that people who can't see the one on the bulletin board can see it. glasgall: We should have a Mac beachball spinny disk. jogama: The dollar cube can be used to buy things. glasgall: What advice would you give the person who runs OpenHatch comes to campus next year? jogama: Don't do it alone, and get started early. dove: What was the most challenging aspect of organizing it? jogama: Making sure that the people who signed up to come actually came and getting food for people who had odd allergies. bbaren: Do you think something like that would make a good CPW event? We have a lot of 'come hang out at SIPB' events; could this work as a participatory event with prefrosh? jogama: I think it would work; there's no reason why it wouldn't. dove: Take a guess and figure out which item achernya didn't realize was up there until recently. jogama: I'd say the blue astronaut. dove: That was my guess. dzaefn: Mine as well. achernya: How are you guys right? glasgall: It's a clean-room suit. bbaren: How do you double-space in the GPL? glasgall: Alternatively, how do you double-space a hackathon? dove: Or how do you double-space OpenHatch Comes to Campus? jogama: How to get non-course-6 people to these events; I'd do it by not just spamming csail-related@ or lists around these department, which would be a good start. dzaefn: What is your favorite level of concentration of isopropyl alcohol? cereslee: This is a serious question, we're deciding your entire election off of it. dzaefn: My second question is, what is the largest number of birds you've seen at the same time in the SIPB office? jogama: Living birds? dzaefn: Sure. jogama: None. dvorak42: The SIPB office is burning down and everyone is trapped here; what or who do you save? You can pick one thing. jogama: The person who knows where the box or the fire extinguisher is. dove: Follow-up question, where is the save-in-case-of-fire box? [jogama walks over and finds it.] dove: Name two things that are in the save-in-case-of-fire box? jogama: The MIT and Comcast frisbee. dove: How do you know that?! achernya: Pick someone in this room and ask them a question that you're either genuinely interested in, or that you think they can't answer? jogama: phurst, did you determine that Ur/Web is a viable web programming language? phurst: No. dove: No as in you didn't, or no as in it's not viable? phurst: I am not answering that question. tboning: Where is the fuse box? jogama: Behind the door. dove: Where is the nearest fire extinguisher? jogama: Is it behind the door? bbaren: It's behind *a* door. dzaefn: Are you sure it's not behind tidor? dove: It's out in the hall. Where's the nearest first-aid kit? jogama: I don't know. dove: It's in the monolith. k_sunter: What is this peculiar instrument [the ??????]. jogama: I've seen people use it to do something like this; is it a ctrl-alt-delete presser? bbaren: It was made by a SIPB member taking a metalworking class. dzaefn: I think ike made it. dvorak42: Name as many office heads as you can. jogama: There's mck [sic]; blinky [sic] is in the monolith almost dead. bbaren: I imagine you don't know which comic they're all from. glasgall: It's from Bloom County, which was popular in the 80s and 90s. dwilson: Identify all the chairs in the office. Interpret this question as you wish. jogama: dove, tboning... achernya: tboning, are you a chair? [cereslee sits on tboning.] achernya: We now accept your answer. dove: Alternatively, who was me before I was me? glasgall: I never thought this was an interesting question. dzaefn: I think the answer is dove. glasgall: What's your favorite programming language? jogama: Lua, even though I've never used it; it doesn't really have classes but it's still object-oriented. glasgall: Can you name another popular language that's non-class-based OO? jogama: Smalltalk? glasgall: Smalltalk had classes. jogama: Can I have a letter? glasgall: J. jogama: JavaScript. glasgall: Related question, what's your favorite text editor? jogama: gEdit. bbaren: What is the name for the thing you put over the hole where people climb down to fix the sewers. jogama: Manhole. bbaren: You would call the *cover* a manhole. glasgall: It's not 'manhole cover'? bbaren: I've also heard 'sewer cap', 'sewer cover', 'utility cover'... apparently you're not allowed to put 'manhole' in certain publications. glasgall: Do you know why they're that shape? jogama: Something to do with safety? glasgall: There's no way you can rotate it so that it'll fall down the hole. bbaren: By the way, it's cheaper to manufacture them in India than it is to manufacture them in the US, even though they weigh like 300 pounds. dove: Pick two SIPB projects; one that you want to work on but don't, and one that you don't want to work on. glasgall: That's not a fair question considering there are service maintainers in the room. dove: The project you want to work on can be one that doesn't exist. dvorak42: And so can the one that you don't want to. jogama: I'd be interested in working on Debathena because of the bugs I've seen myself in using it. bbaren: Come and talk to me after your election. jogama: I've heard not-fun things regarding XVM. glasgall: We're working on turning it around, but we only have so much time. dwilson: What does the X in XVM stand for? If you don't know, make something up. jogama: Xenophobic. dove: I think it actually stands for 'we couldn't get servers.mit.edu'. glasgall: After the success of scripts IS&T decided that SIPB services wouldn't have similarly generic names. bbaren: What's your favorite title of any book int he SIPB office? jogama: This one looks interesting. [holds up _Difficult Conversations_.] dove: I move that dwilson ask the question... I move that *Doctor* dwilson ask the question. bbaren: Can this be dwilson's stage name? dwilson: Why do you want to be a SIPB member? jogama: I'd like to become a SIPB member because I want to find out how software can be used to help people; it hasn't been terribly clear how I can use this to help a lot of people. dove: I'd like to ask the candidates and any prospectives to leave the office. [jogama elected 10-0-1.] achernya: When do you disappear for the summer? jogama: I'm disappearing this Friday and reapparing in the 9th. btidor: Are you or have you ever been a member of the Students for a Democratic Society? jogama: I'm sorry? sparrow_: SDS was an extremely popular organization in the 60s-80s that was involved in anti-racism, activism, that sort of thing. dove: The reason this question was asked was that the MIT group infiltrated other groups and sequestered their funds. tboning: We now have a tax-free Amazon account. The meeting was adjourned at 20:15. Minutes taken and submitted by phurst.