Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2010-06-28 The meeting was called to order by jhamrick at 19:30:00. In attendance were Voting members: afarrell jhamrick pquimby dwilson cesium quentin geofft lexrj lizdenys kaduk fawkes broglek Associate members: jhawk asedeno tlyu Prospectives: leonidg jgross Guests: furst@bu.edu (John Furst) jhamrick: Today we have a membership election for leonid. leonidg: Last weekend we had a hackathon called pterahacktyl on Sunday. We had new people, It was good. We had 19 attendees total. I wrote up some notes about hackathons. because I realized I was solving the same problems that I had solved the last hackathon. They are in my public at /mit/leonidg/Public/HACKATHON_NOTES and at /afs/sipb.mit.edu/admin/office/hackathon_hints.txt and I would appreciate comments. jhamrick: That sounds very good. leonidg: Thanks for coming everyone. kaduk: Matt Power got tired of waiting for me to harass SAFO into getting the sipb SAFO account on giving.mit.edu and so he talked directly to the director of the annual fund. Later today, our account was listed on giving.mit.edu . It appears making donations works. jhawk: Kilo Alpha One Radio geofft: Is that an officer report? kaduk: I can only assume that is Matt Powers' callsign. Project Reports: gdb: So XVM continued debugging its buggy hardware. After much blood, sweat, and tears, we discovered our previously non-booting machines could be booted if you enabled "8dim drive strength" in the bios. If anyone has an idea what "8dim drive strength" actually is, you should let us and the manufacturer know. *laughter* price: But Greg, there was such a helpful explanation in the documentation! Can you tell us what was there? gdb: Good point: In the documentation under the option for 8dim drive strength, it explains "This option enables or disables 8dim drive strength." asedeno: How many dims are in the machine? gdb: aaaahhhh... more than we need. geofft: Were there 16? gdb: a jhawk: I'm sorry, was the last word "string" or "strength"? gdb & geofft: STRENGTH! gdb: HRRRAAH! Strong drives. I mean we did manage to ... jhawk: strong dims? gdb: You can check zlogs in xvm for what that is and what that means. we don't know what that is, its something to do with the RAM. We also discovered that Babylon-4 which was the one we started up and put machines on froze & the dom0 crashed and we still don't know why; we got some MCE out of it. On the other hand, I booted up global dynamics and put some VMs on it and it seems to be fine. Ping that to make sure. Things are still buggy but .... maybe less so ... I don't know...? jhamrick: gutenbach has undergone some major repository structural changes. which I still have yet to email out about. Instead of having separate branches for each part we have just 2. We did an octopus merge. It was awesome. I have now created client scripts. If you go to my launchpad repository you can download package gutenbach-client which will download the scripts onto your machine. Which you can use to print to sipbmp3 or whatever queue you want. They will soon have man pages. leonidg: MITeX, thanks to Jason and uh, Robert er, Jacob... The WYSIWYG of MITeX is now, while not functional in the sense of doing anything with the pdf, is functional in that it does math. So it is mostly a matter of converting HTML to LaTeX. Oh, and we discovered Scriptex, which is basically MITeX, but professionally done. *laughter* The best version costs money. So our efforts are not a total waste. asedeno: As I've been meaning to mention but forgetting for the past 2 weeks and continuing to forget, I've gotten a lout locker for sipb and put lout in it. it is a different typesetting thing. If there is an architecture you want me to build for, let me know. afarrell: officer report: You can now submit agenda items before a meeting. Go to sipb.mit.edu/agenda. There is a web form and you can submit agenda items in the section you would like it to go into. This helps you remember things and helps me more faithfully record things. jhamrick: I would encourage you to email asking for submissions every week otherwise people are going to forget. jhawk: How do I see agenda items? afarrell: There is currently no interface for that. jhawk: That sucks. gdb: Presumably you would use AFS. afarrell: ah, right. You can go to /mit/sipb-www/web_scripts/agenda/records/ and open the file that is named according to the date for which the agenda is about. jhawk: thank you. geofft: So debathena pushed a version of NMH that is 10 years newer than the previous version of NMH to a bunch of machines, including the dialups. price: How old is the new version? geofft: I think it is recent to the last year or two. price: What is NMH? geofft: So NMH is... kevinr: Making it only older than the freshmen? geofft: Yea.. er yea.. it's not older than the freshmen. NMH is a different, er New Mail Handling or something. geofft: *laughter* pquimby: Never name anything new. price: So, a bit older than New House. geofft: It is a set of command line tools for grabbing your mail. You may be most familiar with it as the command inc, which you are never to run, that grabs all your mail and puts it in AFS in a way that makes it hard to put it back to the mail server. gdb: Push undo? geofft: Well it grabs all your mail from the server and puts it in files in a directory and gives you tools to do stuff with it from there. kaduk: What happens if my tokens expire in the middle of that operation? pquimby: pain. geofft: There is a patch we back ported that helps deal with that. There is another patch that we didn't backport that we are working on to quote "Calm the pitchforked, NMH-using masses." We will also possibly rethink some debathena policies and update procedures. Office Reports: lexrj: Someone with machine room access put this kvm stuff here. jhawk: Once again, someone has stolen the magnet from underneath the stapler. in the staple-keeping location outside the office. Does anyone know anything about this. gdb: Presumably someone who took the magnet. jhawk: Seeing nothing, other than Greg Brockman, desperate times call for desperate measures. jhamrick: What would those be? jhawk: I decline to answer. asedeno: We'll now be using the strong nuclear force instead of the electromagnetic force to hold staples. kaduk: I spent about a half hour tidying up the office before the meeting today. There was a lot of clutter and tables that were covered with random food residue. It was kind of gross. if you spill food, wipe it up before it dries. Other: other other: jhawk: What is the difference between a road bump and a road block? leonidg: One of them breaks your car and one only breaks your shocks. broglek: What about a speed hump? We have those in Florida. They aren't any different than speed bumps, but they are labelled differently. geofft: In Louisiana, we have speed lumps... afarrell: Can we offline this discussion? dwilson: Several interesting Supreme Court decisions were handed down today. jhamrick: Firefly is this weekend. fawkes: 4th of July is this weekend. jhamrick: Firefly is more important. just kidding. pquimby: A regional burn as compared with national holiday... cesium: The season finale of Dr. Who was this week. lizdenys: *spoiler* Regular meeting over at 19:42 ---- election of Leonidg ---- jhamrick: Tell us why you are here, how you came to sipb, what you do, and who you are. leonidg: I am Leonid, a prefrosh. I came to sipb via davidben, but he is not here, so I have a picture *pulls up laptop* *laughter & applause* Yea, that's about it. I worked on MITeX, and a bit of barnowl, and I run hackathons. And I work at Ksplice. geofft: So we have a traditional question: Find someone in the room and ask them a question you don't think they can answer and if they fail, answer it. leonidg: Ask the portrait? I didn't think of that, davidben knows the answer to a lot of questions. He has purple hair in this pic so I'm going to ask him: "What hair is better than natural hair?", and I think he couldn't answer that because he was unhappy with this. I'm going to go with blue. geofft: Thank you. Thank you portrait of davidben. gdb: What scares you most about becoming a real MIT student? leonidg: I have to pay money... and keep paying money ... for a while. broglek: Let's say hypothetically you have been tasked to run a hackathon. Pick a dino themed name that hasn't been used. leonidg: Luckily, I talked about that yesterday. I think we decided on ... drohackminius. I have no idea how the normal dinosaur is spelled. geofft: Can you use that in a sentence? leonidg: Can I use that in a sentence? jhamrick: The drohackminius will be eaten by a hackasuarus. lizdenys: You are running a spelling bee, and you have a stereotypical normal kid pitted against a sipb member. What word would you give to the normal kid that the sipb member couldn't spell and what word would you give to the sipb member that the normal kid couldn't spell? leonidg: I would give the normal kid the word creat. price: You have to use it in a sentence. leonidg: You have to *mumblemumblemumble* And the one that sipb couldn't spell: gdb: referer *laughter* leonidg: Oh right, invirt. gdb: No, referer. leonidg: I actually said invirt. geofft: What about propagate? jhawk: Continuing the theme, please expound on how sipb is like Dorian Grey or on paper that is oriented such that it is taller than it is wide. leonidg: Paper that is taller than it is wide? jhawk: *repeats* leonidg: I'll take the 1st. Dorian Grey is famous for looking good on the outside but secretly rotting on the inside. I'm sure members remember the times that there weren't bunches of people sitting with laptops. So while the outward appearance of sipb is vibrant, I'm sure we return to problems again and again. gdb: So you told us about what brought you to sipb, but what brings you back? leonidg: Many of the same things that brought me to MIT in general: interesting projects, nice people. It's better than alternatives. It's one of the better things I could do with my time. cesium: It you are asked to do an interpretive dance based on what is on the board, what would you do? lizdenys: Demonstration is encouraged. fakes: Note that you have not been requested to perform, just say what you would do. leonidg: I would probably learn Chinese first. #Note: the whiteboard was covered in Chinese characters. I could demo running commands on sipbmp3... but I think Chinese would be the first. fawkes: 2nd and 3rd things you would do? leonidg: Interpreting the board into dance. You know, just going through and doing that. gdb: Name something broken and say how you would fix it. leonidg: The current smart-subscribe branch of a patch in barnowl is broken and segfaults in some cases. The solution is to pass it the correct character. jhamrick: Favourite thing hanging from the ceiling that is not the sharkbananna ? *points to the yellow fat thing near the license plate* leonidg: I don't know what it is, but that. It is cuddly. jhamrick: We have many cuddly animals. leonidg: but they aren't hanging from the ceiling, otherwise it'd be the grumpy fuzzball. afarrell: Crude oil begins spilling from a pipe in the ceiling over near the bookshelf. What do you do? leonidg: Call Lex because he is the office Царь and he'll know what to do. Or the police, or BP. jhawk: What does the phrase "Running on creative energy" mean to you? leonidg: Mostly doing things you don't really know how to do but being really enthusiastic. jhawk: That used to be the marketing slogan of BP. pquimby: So the office is filling with crude, what do you do? leonidg: Probably sell it at this point. pquimby: Is there anything more specifically related to emergency procedures you might do? leonidg: Get it a bucket. kaduk: There's a hole in your bucket... lexrj: So, you see someone running toward the office with a torch. leonidg: I close the door. geofft: the crude oil starts living up to its name and insulting you... leonidg: Insult it back. asedeno: But it's light sweet crude... jhawk: So, how can SIPB be more inviting to prefrosh and escape the singleton-prefrosh situation? leonidg: I'm not convinced you want to pull in prefrosh. In the sense that you know, jhawk: So you think we should just rm -rf the inode and fsck block party? leonidg: Oh, you mean during CPW? jhawk: Not exclusively... leonidg: So, my situation is weird because I spend like 2 hours in high school. But like any normal situation you want to show them that sipb is interesting and cool. Talk to them. Avoid sipb members being in tight clusters talking to each other. kaduk: So, we at the sipb like to keep a well stocked monolith... We've got things like pencils and staples and office supplies... leonidg: Where are these? *points to the monolith* kaduk: Anything you think we should add? leonidg: What is currently is in it? price: A lot. Go take a glance. *looks* leonidg: Toiletries. afarrell: I'll note we already have one-time pads. leonidg: I mean, we have a couch, and as we all know, some people sleep on it. For instance geofft. I plan to as well. We have a bathroom. geofft: This is why we have drawers and I have a toothbrush and toothpaste and... kaduk: And a running laptop? jhamrick: Really? geofft: Yea, see the cable? jhamrick: wha... why? geofft: Because I was too lazy to shut it down. This is a discussion about Leonid, not me. fawkes: Name something that is fixed and propose a way to break it. leonidg: SIPB and by staging a coup and forming an anarchist society run by rogue officers. afarrell: Meaning the SDS... jhamrick: Have you ever or will you ever be a member of the Students for a Democratic Society? leonidg: I don't know what that is, So no. Will I? It doesn't sound fun, so probably not. cesium: Who would you expect to lead this coup? leonidg: Lex certainly, as office царь. So not really rogue officers, rogue царьs ... and Greg. And you. Something about those eyes. gdb: What would you like to see sipb doing differently? leonidg: Figure out the prospectives thing, I don't have an opinion on where it should go, But I want it to be fixed. price: What is your favourite service sipb provides now, and what should sipb create to provide something new and valuable to the community? leonidg: My favourite is the office. The people and the fact that we have an office for people to hang out and that people can walk in and talk. That it is not just that some dude's apartment. price: So the community that people can *mumble* leonidg: I mean if I knew the ... I guess this isn't really feasible, but Kyle is having problems with BU's IS&T and we had people from Brandeis talk to us and so we could serve as advocates for computing at other universities. It does hold a lot of weight when an organisation at MIT says that it isn't crazy. broglek: Wow. Yea. That was profound. Talk to me later. geofft: You get a 1/2 hour meeting with Marylin Smith, head of IS&T. What do you talk about? She wants to have regular meetings with sipb and you are the person she is meeting. leonidg: I have no idea. I would ask her to let us make moira lists as a command. That would probably take more than one meeting. geofft: Thats also rather low level for the head of IS&T. geofft: She wants to give $10000 to SIPB to create a new service. What should we give it to? leonidg: A more professional linerva perhaps. price: What is the difference from the dialups? leonidg: Well for instance, there would be only one so you can run barnowl on it. jhamrick: What would this have? leonidg: More stability... broglek: Steam Locomotive! price: How would $10,000 buy that? leonidg: I don't really know what causes problems. gdb: afs? leonidg: geofft: So you could throw that at the AFS developers to solve bugs. pquimby: So emf repeatedly coughs its guts up and we can only reboot it leonidg: emf? geofft: Edna-may-furnbugle. It's from Bloom county. Also known as lost-contact at MIT.edu It serves every afs server ever. pquimby: Anyway, it repeatedly times out on socket connections despite repeated attempts to fix it. Suggest a possible cause. leonidg: The ethernet cable has a bad connection and keeps coming out. Have you tried that? dwilson: So you are currently working for Ksplice which started when people had an issue with scripts give another scenario where people have an issue that then turns into a startup. leonidg: So MITeX gets too many requests and then I start scriptex ... leonidg: Or perhaps you have a bug in your sql that you don't want to restart your database server and you create a product that hot-patches your database and call it splicesql that does the same thing. And maybe is a subsidiary of Ksplice. geofft: Are you familiar with theology of Jesus Christ Superstar where Judas helps out things by making the crucification happen? So if you take this same philosophy and apply it to the guy who broke into scripts, he caused a good thing for the world. If you could break anything to cause a good service for the world, which one would it be? leonidg: I'm going to break into debathena. I don't know what that means. geofft: What positive side effects would result? leonidg: Athena 11. asedeno: So you have this smart-subscribe branch in barnowl, What other things do you have planned? leonidg: Do I have have to make them? Or just things others can make? asedeno: Either. leonidg: I don't want to do anything else myself. Maybe search in popup windows, maybe gbarnowl which is graphical, but just simply barnowl where you can move the stuff around. pquimby: So 10 years from now, debathena is going great, but it is big and people want a minimalist subset. What do you include? leonidg: shell, mail, web, an editor, zephyr. Everyone will use zephyr in 10 years. gdb: Traditionally, newly elected members eat the ballots from their elections. If elected, Would you? leonidg: no. well well well...yea no. cesium: What is the most amusing mispronunciation of your name you have ever heard? leonidg: I think "loined"? lexrj: So you said this minimalist version of yours would have and editor- office: no, no, no... leonidg: emacs lizdenys: yes! gdb: Booo... lexrj: I'm aware you would include emacs. Would you be willing to put emacs and vim or submit your users to only emacs? leonidg: Well, that would depend on how minimalist you wanted it to be. lizdenys: According to your definition of minimalist, would having both be redundant? leonidg: Yes. jhawk: So even if it was cross-cut, mixed with oatmeal, honey, and marzipan, you would not eat the ballots? leonidg: So yes, that was what I was thinking about when I hesitated. I suppose if you made a pie with enough good things... gdb: I hear we have an Elizabeth in the room. dwilson: Where are nearest fire extinguisher, first-aid kit and circuit breaker? leonidg: Well, the first-aid kid is right there in the monolith. Fire extinguisher, I think there's one by the bathroom I think so. Circuit breaker? Probably in the machine room- *eeeerrrr (indicating falsehood)* Oh, maybe it is behind the door. dwilson: There is a fire extinguisher behind the whiteboard. kaduk: How familiar are you with the standard editor? leonidg: Are you referring to ed sir? kaduk: yes. leonidg: I know how to quit it. kaduk: I take it you would not install ed to the exclusion of emacs? leonidg: no. broglek: nano? leonidg: There are some features I consider essential that nano just doesn't have. lizdenys: Define minimalist using only buzzwords. minimally. fawkes: Use only essential buzzwords. leonidg: uuhhh... streamlined, progressive, Karenistic Shit, what is she working on? SharePointistic. jhawk: Many people, including this emacs user consider it essential to have an editor with extremely small working set and extremely rapid startup. gdb: That's not a question. jhawk: What is the question? leonidg: Well, presumably you are going to ask me to reconcile this with my choice, and I'd say you could install viper and have a very minimal .emacs file. jhamrick: Suppose there is a fire, what do you do? leonidg: Um, I grab the fire extinguisher, and call 9-11, and tell people... jhamrick: Are you aware of the save in case of fire box? leonidg: What's that? jhamrick: A box over there with copy of posix, some crypto keys, also Frisbee. You should save it. fawkes: I should note that in the case of an actual fire alarm, your life is more important than the box. broglek: Suppose there is no fire, but the fire alarm goes off 6 times in 3 days. What do you do? leonidg: I yell at the person in charge of fire alarms at pika. jhawk: Which is more minimalist: emacs or tmacs? leonidg: Does the 't' stand for 'tiny'? jhawk: *explains tmacs* Which is more minimal? leonidg: tmacs jhawk: Which do you include? leonidg: Emacs. jhawk: how do you reconcile this? leonidg: I do not. One of the essential things in a minimal distribution is my happiness and I am a user. jhawk: You aren't a user, you are a developer. You have to build emacs to become a user. jhamrick: I move that Tom ask the question tlyu: Leonid, Why do you want to become a sipb member? leonidg: Well Tom, there are several reasons: Having access to zephyr and Athena. if I get mugged and need to use my laptop. More important is having a key and being able to sleep on the couch. *office laughs and looks askance* No really, part of my goal in life is to accumulate as many places where I can sleep and people might be confused, but won't be like "Who the fuck is that? Call the police.". Boston has a number of such places. And my 3rd is, you know, all of that community stuff. jhamrick: Everyone who is not a member, please leave the room. ---- interview ends at 20:14 ---- leonidg is elected as a new member of the Board! --------------------------------- vinitlee enters meeting adjourned at 20:21. Minutes taken and submitted by afarrell.