Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2014-11-17 The meeting was called to order by vasilvv at 19:30. In attendance were Voting members: asuhl, bbaren, vasilvv, dzaefn, belzner, dove Associate members: glasgall, achernya, adenhert, ianucci, jdreed, danjared, tlyu Prospectives: madars, sparrow_, tthoma24, abrahamq, jlrubin, amber, slz, jakobw Guests: vasilvv: today we'll have elections for sparrow_, madars, and tthoma24. Administrivia ============= tthoma24: there was an email about moving sipb@ to an RT queue and wanted to bring it up again. -chorus of agreement- vasilvv: movement to move it to RT queue. White ballot. -seconded- vasilvv: motion passes Project Updates =============== glasgall: xvm updated its certs so it will continue to work in the future. sparrow_: another cluedump on Wednesday on vim in 4-231. achernya: for unclear reasons I've written a zlogger in go. vasilvv: I am talking to oisfinance. jdreed: in terms of office heads SIPB typically gets one of the new athena machines. tthoma24: somebody wanted creative cloud for the mac, so somebody should talk to someone from IS&T about that. jdreed: just put it on there. Other ===== glasgall: last week for the first time in history someone completed enough of a simulator that multics ran on that it was able to enter user mode, compile a program, and run it. I had nothing to do with this endeavor. bbaren: I'm selling an SSD, so if you would like to buy an SSD for like $70 let me know. vasilvv: in other news, Microsoft promised to open-source .NET under MIT license and put it on github. Other Other =========== tthoma24: it's cute that CAC thinks they're going to close the student center over thanksgiving break. bbaren: they chain the doors shut. adenhert: it's actually not very cute, it's... pretty effective. jdreed: the faculty and student support team now has a new member. amber: we're going to be working on some projects this year including but not limited to a forum for if you want to make things. ?: can you tell us more about the sorts of projects you're going to try to facilitate? amber: I'm not going to dictate the sorts of projects that people come up with, since I'm new here I want to get a sense of what people need to develop and keep developing jdreed: IS&T is trying to make it easier for the community to create and work with APIs and mumble mumble cloud mumble developer speak adenhert: does this noticeably increase our chances of getting a scripts.mit.edu that's run by people paid to run it? amber: I can't speak to that. ?: do we want to enter open door closed session? adenhert: I refer to that as clopen session. Membership Election =================== vasilvv: may the candidates please introduce themselves sparrow_: I'm sparrow. I started working at IS&T almost a year ago, worked there for 10 months, started coming to SIPB a few months ago. I recently started going back to school at Roxbury Community College for CS. madars: I'm madars, I'm a fourth year grad student doing crypto. also a fourth year prospective. tried to join sipb, got hosed, wrote the door script, got hosed, now I'm organizing cluedumps along with sparrow and teddy. tthoma24: I'm teddy, I work in IS&T, also organizing cluedumps. I do things. asuhl: what's the most interesting interaction you've had helping a user? tthoma24: there are just so many like I don't even know. sparrow_: I've had a number of interesting interactions with users. I can tell a brief story in a way that involves few enough details. Someone called IS&T's helpdesk from a room on campus and said "I'm having trouble connecting my computer to a projector" and she sounded kind of agitated and finally she's like "oh he's here he's helping me" and then she says "oh he fixed it, it works now what did he do." and I said "I'm sorry, but you're 30 feet from him and this happened 10 seconds ago you should have seen it and I can't see what he did." and she said "oh but you're so knowledgable and helpful and I just thought you'd know" and I just said "I don't have that kind of power"... tthoma24: umm. ?: did you ever walk in on a woman on the phone and help her with the projector from 30 feet away? tthoma24: I don't have any good stories. I pass. bbaren: have you ever started helping a user, either over the phone or in person or whatever, you help them for 5 to 10 minutes, and then you realize they're not actually affiliated with MIT in any way shape or form, and if so what did you then do when you discovered this? tthoma24: this guy knocks on the door at like 5 o'clock and I ask what's wrong and he says "oh I can't log in" and I thought oh this will just be like 5 minutes, but then it ended up being like 20 minutes. I'm not sure what he was trying to do. sparrow_: I can tell a story. So apple's internal support it turns out says call ist. this was really early on in my job so I didn't know this and so someone called and said "you have to help me I'm locked out of my office" and I said "okay where are you" and he said "I'm on the cupertino campus" and I just said "I'm sorry, you've reached MIT. Maybe you should ask one of your coworkers for the correct number." jdreed: how do you feel about how paper and toner is stocked in the clusters? tthoma24: it's funny how paper is just kind of there for the taking. jdreed: are you now or have you ever been someone who has taken paper from the clusters? tthoma24: no I have not. madars: I've been someone who has taken paper from the clusters. I really love the convenience vasilvv: it's sunday evening and a user comes in and says all the printers in W20 cluster are not working. what is your course of action? madars: I'd probably ask what not working means. vasilvv: one says out of order, one says out of cartridge, on one pharos is all glitched out, the fourth says internal error and now this is the state of the cluster yesterday. madars: I'd tell them that the SIPB office has a printer and if they're nice they can use it. jdreed: I'd like it recorded for the minutes that the wrong answer to this question is to send me a facebook message on sunday night saying that pharos is broken. That happened. glasgall: a user calls the office saying they got an error message saying "LP0: printer on fire". What do you do? sparrow: do you have more details? glasgall: it's just this message scrolling on screen. The printer does not seem to actually be on fire. The user is an elderly faculty member at home. madars: does he have a nobel prize or something? glasgall: what I'm getting at is that this is a message the unix kernel will actually print. achernya: in particular this is a message that comes from back when printers used to actually catch fire on certain faults. bbaren: this was not helped by the fact that printers were usually lubricated and cleaned with alcohol which does exciting things when it catches fire. vasilvv: for madars, how do you double space a zero-knowledge proof? madars: zero-knowledge proofs like I work on are succinct so there is no space for double spacing. dzaefn: I have two questions. One, do any of you know why a certain printer in this cluster sometimes prints the pages out of order? madars: I have no idea sparrow_: printers do a lot of unprintable things tthoma24: this is why we shouldn't have them any more. dzaefn: second question: what is this? sparrow_: I think I know dzaefn: this is the control-alt-deleter sparrow_: it's a tool for remotely implementing ctrl-alt-delete on someone else's computer achernya: which service do you wish each person could provide using remctl. Go around the room in turns until everyone is exhausted. bbaren: you may assume the existence of a global lock manager for this exercise. madars: I definitely wish I could remctl achernya craziness + 9000 sparrow_: I am not sure how to answer this question dove: you could remctl someone else to answer this question. tthoma24: I'll remctl you to answer this question, dove. dove: does this mean we recurse? achernya: no, you just answer the question one time. dove: this just went from really fun to really unfun. Uhh... I would remctl asuhl to ship my packages. asuhl: for how many ruble? dove: I have 13 US dollars. dzaefn: do you accept bitcoin? asuhl: does biggerpackage4u.ru say it accepts bitcoin? ?: wait, do you actually run biggerpackage4u.ru? asuhl: yep. sparrow_: I like introducing biggerpackage4u.ru to people as "a clever MIT student I know tried to build a really sketchy website and succeeded!" madars: I'd like to remctl jlrubin to extend bitcoin project to grad students jlrubin: stay tuned. vasilvv: okay this question is no longer fun. ?: what are the operating systems you've tried and why are you sticking with the one you're currently using? madars: I started out with using windows 98 and used DOS for a while and other versions of windows. Used openBSD for a while. Now running linux because for my research it's useful. I'm using ubuntu because I like people fixing bugs. sparrow_: I started out on windows ME. Which I think was a good think, because it built character. As a kid, having a computer that crashes frequently in ways that no adult knows anything about forces you to be very comfortable with things crashing frequently. I've used other versions of windows, played around with ubuntu a bit. Now I mostly use windows 7 because cross compatibility is a priority tthoma24: I started out using windows 95. Now I use a mac. dzaefn: taking turns, replace each word in the phonetic alphabet with someone's kerberos. -They do this- dove: we should have modified this to be kerberos principles that when you pronounce them they start with the sound of the letter. vasilvv: let's move on to shorter and more fun questions. dove: and more traditional questions ?: which operating system will glasgall resurrect next, and why? madars: I think adam might resurrect an easy one, like DRDOS, to test ?: doesn't count because DRDOS is still being used. I'm not telling you how because it's terrifying. jdreed: of the three religious debates: emacs versus vi, brace styles, and deb versus rpm, what do you think is the most pointless? jdreed: d) all of the above is also an answer sparrow_: I choose d! achernya: in the SIPB machine room, we have some interesting disposal properties. servers aren't, disks are shredded, and cables multiply. Give me the most spectacular way of disposing of a server. tthoma24: give it to sparrow_: I like the idea of taking it out away from people, taking it apart with power tools, and then giving it to a prospective art school student for portfolio work. madars: It'd be cool to catapult a server and while it's in flight just shoot a rocket at it. achernya: follow up question. there is art in the machine room. it is important. what art would you add to the machine room? glasgall: and why is it important that there be at least one piece of art in the machine room? tthoma24: I think I know why it's important. I'm not sure what I would add. sparrow_: I want to say tradition, but i suspect this is not actually the case. Because it is nice to look at and we like it? glasgall: close enough, when you've been in there forever debugging it's nice to have something to look at that isn't gray and brown. ?: what is a command that brought you a lot of joy the first time you saw it? madars: there is a command called sl. bbaren: describe your ideal computing setup. If you could have any computing setup in the world, what for you would be the pinnacle of computer technology in your life? sparrow_: I'd like to have one of every major platform for debugging purposes. tthoma24: I'm happy with my mac. More RAM? Just all of the RAM? dove: you have to provide the question. The answer is "behind the door" madars: where is the circuit breaker? vasilvv: what about there (points)? sparrow_: where is the box that should be saved in case of fire? vasilvv: and what about there, past the defcon sign? sparrow_: where is the fire extinguisher? dzaefn: frisbees. sparrow_: what is in the save in case of fire box? ?: one time pads tthoma24: also what is in the save in case of fire box? For some reason. achernya: the list behind the door labeled "who do I notify". madars: this is when a user comes in and says "I'm really desperate" tthoma24: no... vasilvv: name all the CPU architectures present in this office. dove: you could have just given them the answer and waited for the question. vasilvv: Well I guess I could do that. I'll give you the answer and you have to point. -They do this- glasgall: a traditional one. name one thing you would add and one thing you would remove from the sipb office. achernya: indicate whether or not it should be hanging from the ceiling. dove: preferably inanimate objects sparrow_: cables are known to multiply. I would like to go through them and find the ones that aren't likely to serve a purpose and relocate them to a better home. I'm not sure we need anything that we don't currently possess. madars: I'd like to add a DVD in which all of the contents of that drawer is digitized and once it's digitized we can remove it from the office and give it to MIT archives. tthoma24: can we remove that stupid wire that has been hanging from the center of the ceiling for at least as long as I've been around. that thing is going to be removed and we're going to put a kerberos Squishable in its place. vasilvv: any other questions? Okay, each one of you pick one person in the office and ask them a question you think they can't answer and then answer it yourself. madars: alex, please name one reason why writing a zephyr client in go is a bad idea. achernya: because it takes my time. vasilvv: what would be your answer? madars: because it takes too much time tthoma24: jdreed, why are the cyrus servers being shut off? jdreed: because they're unloved technology and mumble mumble march of progress. sparrow_: who besides sipb@ is currently in the process of moving to RT? it is an organization that I'm volunteering for that is not a student organization. vasilvv: who? sparrow_: archiveofourown.org. It currently has 16bugs. I'm sure it has quite a bit more than 16 bugs, and it can't handle their load. tlyu: name one thing about SIPB that you think could be improved and how would you improve it. sparrow_: I think SIPB is less accessible than it could be. I've felt motivated to improve this. The SIPB docs page needs love badly and I've been daunted by that project for a while. One thing I'd like to do this holiday season is get someone to talk through potential changes and sanity check that with me. I also think it would be nice to have office hours to encourage people to come in and collaborate and get to know SIPB in a context that is not a meeting. I am moving to a fulltime undergrad schedule and also working so hosage is unlikely to let this get implemented as well as I would like. madars: I would really love the office to be open at predictable times. tthoma24: everything that was said previously and I'd like to see the office not be a mess. there's cables everywhere, too many chairs, the tables are kind of weird. vasilvv: any other questions. No? Okay. I move tom to pick one candidate and ask the question. tlyu: sparrow, why do you want to be a SIPB member? sparrow_: I like SIPB. I like that it is an organization that is dedicated to computing in a unique way, open to cruft and people on an untraditional path towards computing knowledge. I like that it does many different things for and with many different people. I like that it is much less corporate than many other computing groups and computing outreach groups. vasilvv: I move danjared ask one of the remaining candidates the question. danjared: teddy, why do you want to be a SIPB member? tthoma24: I want my kerberos to not turn off when I leave MIT. sparrow_: full disclosure, my account status is currently doomed. vasilvv: I move alex ask madars the question. adenhert: madars, why do you want to be a SIPB member? madars: I really love SIPB and I think that being a member will help me contribute more and be more involved. permanent athena account is a bonus, but it's mostly because I love SIPB. vasilvv: now we will proceed to the closed meeting. - RESULTS - tthoma24: 7 0 1 madars: 8 0 0 sparrow_: 8 0 0 vasilvv: congratulations teddy, madars, and sparrow. You are now SIPB members! vasilvv: anything else for any other report at this meeting? glasgall: confirming that it is trying to make athena for the masses, dropbox bought zeromailer this week. meeting adjourned at 8:46. Minutes taken and submitted by belzner.