Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 9.30.02


The meeting was called to order at 7:30 PM by tibbetts.

In attendance were
	Voting members: rax nim arolfe ike golem jenselby tibbetts dmaze aletta
		int18 | alex_c alien
	Associate members: xela jhawk lnemzer aatharuv rjbarbal srz proven |
		gschmidt
	Non-voting members:
	Prospectives: miah jtu kareid ssen seph | malon kchen
	Guests:

Treasurer's Report:
	nim: No, I went to Tahiti.
	tibbetts: I was thinking of going to Tahiti.
	nim: There may be enough for a second ticket.  Oh, and Jane sent checks.
		They will come to the SIPB office.

Chairman's Report:
	aletta: I want to nominate jtu for membership.
	<seconded by nim>
	jtu: You people are silly, but ok.
	aletta: She ran SIPB tours, which was cool since everyone else was
		completely lame.  She has worked on iAthena a bit.
	jtu: Whenever a user walks in the door, I say hi and redirect them to
		someone else.
	aletta: She makes people less scared of SIPB.
	<13-0-0, motion passes>

	tibbetts: I want to nominate seph for membership.  He helped me with
		sipb-rt, he helped with the crypto locker and probably did stuff
		before I was a member.
	rjbarbal: I thought seph was a member.  When will you next be in town?
	seph: Next week, since I am unemployed and can stay for two weeks.
	<13-0-0, motion passes>

Office Report:
	tibbetts: I have been lame about buying things.  I will be less lame
		now.

	xela: O'Reilly is coming out with a book called Mac OS X for UNIX geeks.
		Allocate $60 for it.
	<nim seconds>
	jhawk: Is it any good?  I think we should wait until it is published.
	xela: O'Reilly books are usually good.
	jhawk: My objection is not satisfied but I will withdraw it anyway.
	<white ballot>
	[xela allocation: $60 for Mac OS X for UNIX geeks]

	lnemzer: The authors of Mason are putting out a book through O'Reilly
		that will become the official documentation.  I would like to
		pre-order it.  $50.
	<xela seconds>
	tibbetts: mason sucks.  Does anyone use it and like it?
	nim: I know enough people who use it that I think it is a good idea.
	rjbarbal: I agree it sucks, but we should have the book.
	jhawk: I think we should wait to see what the book looks like.
	lnemzer: This is going to be the official documentation and it will be
		online.
	rax: We know what it looks like.  There is a picture on lnemzer's
		screen.
	tibbetts: What is the animal?
	lnemzer: I think it is a monkey.
	nim: We need it.
	<13-2-5, motion passes>
	[xela allocation: $50 for Mason book]

Office Cleaning Report:
	aatharuv: It happened, and zephyred the user on the scanner.  Now it
		checks for something.
	dmaze: What is the check?
	aatharuv: It reads members and prospectives.

MIT Computing Report:

Computer Services:
	yak: Not involving Hal Abelson at all, Sussman installed in the
		mechanics locker for Linux a Scheme classical mechanics thing.

	tibbetts: sipb-rt is slow because it is on a VMWare machine.  If there
		were a database server, we would use it.  There is actually a
		user now, or maybe more.
	jhawk: Do you not want it to be Oracle?
	seph: RT doesn't do Oracle.
	nim: <something he described as "unimportant">
	jhawk: I don't have my hand raised, but we do have Oracle media and I
		have been lame about reinstalling; I wouldn't be it if we had a
		customer.  But I guess this isn't one.
	tibbetts: Unless you want to port RT to Oracle.
	tibbetts: If you are interested in PostgreSQL or something, this is
		something you could play with.	

SIPB Backup Report:

Publications Report:
	rax: We suck so unbelievably much on iAthena.

	tibbetts: I have this idea that we should start writing a Tech column.
		They like this idea.  So after this meeting, in one of the PDR's I will
		be doing an organizational thing.  To be in this Friday we need to have
		it in for editing on Wednesday at 5PM.
	yak: We probably don't want The Tech editing our text.
	tibbetts: We have someone in production who can deal with that for us.
	jhawk: Brad is wrong.  Being unedited is wrong.

Orientation Report:
	rax: We have frosh.
	tibbetts: You're a frosh, right Kevin?
	kchen: Yes.

IAP Report:
	alien: At the moment we are looking for teachers for C and Crash
		Courses. If you want to teach anything else let me know, even if
		you are not sure, so we can get rooms. At the moment we have ten
		courses, which is more than last year at this point.
	rjbarbal: Can we teach non-computer classes through SIPB?
	xela: We have done it before.
	rjbarbal: I was thinking of teaching a class on tea.
	tibbetts: I was talking to a lawyer at the Career Fair and she and I had
		this idea that someone could teach a class on patent law.  They
		would be using it as a slimy recruitment exercise but I don't
		mind because the class wouldn't suck.
	arolfe: I like the idea of exploiting lawyers.
	xela: An excellent idea.
	tibbetts: I will offer our sponsorship.

CokeComm Report:

Other:

Other Other:
	dmaze: The view from on top of the monolith is a lot clearer with the
		NeXT hardware gone.

The meeting was adjourned at 7:48 PM.


	Minutes taken and submitted by rax.