========================================================= NOTE: These are DRAFT minutes until this note is removed. ========================================================= Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2009-07-20 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by ezyang. In attendance were Voting members: ezyang kaduk biyeun xavid jesstess geofft price nelhage quentin Associate members: mitchb jhawk belmonte lgdean wdaher Prospectives: pweaver maria89 pbaranay adehnert | s4m tihaung Guests: Virgil Officer Reports: ezyang: Today we have membership election for pbaranay, after regular reports. kaduk: Seems to have possibly been some confusion last week about current budget for FY2010 $16,800 decrease 15% from previous FY. quentin: Fixed expenses come out of that? kaduk: Yes. pbaranay: Hi, I'm ... rising junior in Course 20. First really showed up at SIPB in November. Realized a bunch of people I knew, geofft, quentin, broder were hanging out here, got prospectivized unexpectedly, started poking at wakeup server with geofft for a little while. Didn't go too well, but fun to play with. Taught IAP LaTeX class with jesstess, hung around, helped to think up clockworks idea before ezyang really fleshed out, made improvements to website. Main thing is working on Mirrors, broder's idea originally, but I've really enjoyed implementing it. ezyang: Questions? geofft: Favorite SIPB dialup other than linerva. May use any SIPB service you can use as a dialup. pbaranay: Scripts? geofft: Even though it can't get to half the files in your locker? geofft: Favorite SIPB webhost other than scripts? pbaranay: XVM? nelhage: What technique would you recommend to a prospective to learn git to effectively learn to contribute to a SIPB project, or what did you use to learn? pbaranay: Talked to you. Learning git is exponentially more difficult to use if you've learned a system already. If they don't know what an rcs is, they need to learn that. If they've learned svn, they need to unlearn some of that. Probably I'd clone a repo for them, and show them how to add, commit, use git help, etc. quentin: You think git's help is good? ezyang: I think it's good. nelhage: I think it's true that there isn't really a good git tutorial. pbaranay: So there should be an iGit? nelhage: If you write one, please make sure it's available on the Internet and useful outside SIPB. kaduk: Opinion on man versus info pages? pbaranay: I use man pages. belmonte: I have two questions. First, pose a question to which nobody else here knows the answer, then answer it. pbaranay: What is the biological importance of actin filaments. belmonte: Oh, that's easy. They contribute to cellular structure and form the cytoskeleton. pbaranay: That's correct. belmonte: Do-over. And don't ask about myosin this time. pbaranay: Succinctly describe the advantages of rsync over ftp. nelhage: Difficult to be succinct. mitchb: Difficult to be *r*sync'd? price: Saves bandwidth. jhawk: Works through firewalls. belmonte: Describe SIPB's most significant strength and its most significant liability. These may be technical or social, and may or may not be distinct. pbaranay: Greatest weakness is not good about looking outside of ourselves and get used to only asking people we know and have gotten used to. Sometimes useful to see how things look to people who aren't as natively ____ Greatest strength is there are a lot of people who are scary-good at computers, one-stop place at MIT for wanting to get anything done related to computing. ezyang: From description, seem to have spent a while drifting before found project you really wanted to work on. How'd you feel when you found it? pbaranay: Felt great - finally found something I could do, had previously thought about scripts, but found that didn't want to integrate into group that was already working fairly well. This was approached by broder, got help from him and quentin... kaduk: Something you'd add to the office to make it better. pbaranay: I'd add a loft. jesstess: No. Rejected. jhawk: Familiar with history of SIPB loft? pbaranay: Yes. jhawk: Summarize succinctly. No, be verbose. pbaranay: jhawk: Had loft in 39, some issues with it, maybe ask srz about it. Basically, people did what they do in lofts. jesstess: Sleep? jhawk: That's just one aspect. price: Long list of things you did around SIPB before we got to closing the deal and having this election. How could SIPB be better about integrating new people and getting new members. pbaranay: I don't really think this was slow in coming in that I felt that I'd been around the office a lot and gotten to know alot of the SIPB, but didn't get to do anything of note until Mirrors came into existence. price: Those are not historical requirements. pbaranay: Think SIPB needs to do a better job of drawing people in and retaining them. Lot of people who come in and get prospectivized, and never come back. Need to make sure people have one particular contact in the office. If they already have the social network, no big deal, but otherwise you need to make sure they come back and get involved. As far as retention, I don't think it's so bad that it might take a year or two to get membered, because each individual is different. What worries me is that there are people who just vanish. price: You had a concrete suggestion, almost. How do you suggest implementing it. If they don't know people... pbaranay: During Fall, might be good to have specific time set aside for prospectives, meetings work, but want to make sure you're available for people who can't make Monday meetings or don't want to come to another meeting. If it were me, I'd have made myself more available. Can do that on an ad-hoc basis. Want to make sure contacts follow up with people. kaduk: pbaranay: Would like to know more about XVM because I massively fail at using it, and want to know more. Interested in what jhamrick did with NLP. belmonte: Want to be the new seven locker maintainer? pbaranay: Yes, what is it? [laughter] belmonte: jesstess: Can choose (incl other). Which personality traits predominate SIPB in a major way and discourages people from contributing to each other: people are assholes to each other, people are passive-aggressive at each other particularly on zephyr, people are lazy. pbaranay: Will address two. About lazy, yes people are, but you can drift in and out as long as you leave people to take care of the projects, and it's nice because SIPB doesn't give you too much penalty for taking a break. As for people being assholes to each other, they are, and I'm not sure what to do about it, but being involved with SIPB is kind of a humbling experience, at least with your egos but... need to stop focusing on self and more on what works for organization as a whole. You need to think back on what being part of SIPB is really about. geofft: Name as many machines in machine room as you can? mitchb: Need to be real? pbaranay: charon, not sure how many scripts. reynelda, three zephyr servers. Been in smr once. geofft: zephyr ones aren't ours, only one is there. pbaranay: XVM, linerva, dr-wily. jhawk: Tell us why you'd volunteer to maintain a locker you know nothing about, and what do you know about locker maintenance? pbaranay: It's belmonte, and I trust him to judge. Fight against bitrot, make sure ACLs are appropriate, etc. Fundamentally, I trust belmonte. belmonte: Oh, be careful! It's biological software. It can be whatever you want it to be. quentin: Best and worse service. pbaranay: Best service is being here in the office, because nobody can actually replicate that, not even in software, though jhamrick is trying. Worst right now is AskSIPB because it doesn't exist. kaduk: Will need help this Fall. wdaher: Know of Boff Mary Kill. Want to make a SIPB analog: work on hackathon, maintain service, or kill. pbaranay: Work on scripts for a hackathon, marry linerva, kill stuff. geofft: At a SIPB election. Compare to UA elections in form of a haiku. pbaranay: SIPB Elections, lots of strange questions, who am I running against? nelhage: Similar note, but more seriously. Pick one thing you think SIPB could learn from the UA and vice versa. pbaranay: Think SIPB could learn a lot from the UA in regards to recruitment in that UA is better at getting out there and pushing people onto a specific committee or the senate, and you have a specific role in the organization, know what's expected of you, but don't have as much freedom to move around. What UA can learn from SIPB, though much has happened thanks to njess and others: technical clue, revision control, tech solutions to social problems. belmonte: About that haiku of yours, it was an excellent on-the-fly construction, and I wholeheartedly approve, but what do you think of the subject pronoun "who" as an object? pbaranay: Think it's unfortunate, wasn't thinking of grammar at the time, use when trying to piss somebody off. jhawk: Biggest problem facing MIT and computing at MIT today? pbaranay: So many answers to the first part. jhawk: If belmonte and I were to form a rock band, we might call it "The Whom." pbaranay: Athena machines are becoming less and less relevant to users, and IS&T and SIPB are taking steps to address that. People will prefer mobile laptops, should produce more documentation explaining the value of the clusters. There's a lot of space and resources being taken up by clusters, and space is a critical resource. Might be losing on the opportunity costs. jhawk: Are you saying the biggest problem is use of cluster resources? pbaranay: Possibly. First part, think biggest problem facing MIT is all the reorg going on in administration, much shuffling that hasn't been resolved yet and might not be for a little bit. jhawk: Will you play frisbee after the meeting? ezyang: You have a game to write. kaduk: I move that belmonte asks the question. belmonte: pbaranay, why do you want to be a SIPB member? pbaranay: I would like to be a SIPB member because I feel that the SIPB for all of its occasional faults is a very strong community that goes far beyond what's currently happening here this year. Goes back many years, will continue on to the future, and I'm excited to be part of that community that's done a staggering amount of service for MIT. I approached it very much as a service group, which isn't how I came into it - came in through social connections, but think it manages to be both. belmonte: Also, you want a key to the office. <13-0-0 - pbaranay is membered> SIPB Projects Report: pbaranay: Mirrors is in something resembling a beta phase. Most mirrors up including Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. quentin: Notable because Fedora's own mirrors have been laggy lately. pbaranay: Also have a lot of new people working on it, which is exciting. mitchb: Move to allocate $100 for 750GB SATA disk.... jhawk: White ballot? Office Report: jhawk: Seem to have ants. I talked to CAC, and they'll talk to exterminator-type people. If you drop food on the floor, will acquire ants in hours, so be careful. mitchb: Did you mention the flying insect issue? jhawk: No, I'd forgotten. mitchb: Will you add it. kaduk: Are you trying to say the office is bugged? belmonte: No, it's buggy. wdaher: I apologize for laughing at that. quentin: Had problems with XVM-dev's RAID consisting of it reporting a drive failure maybe a month ago, didn't think much because dev, RAID6. Got fed up with beeping and tried to repair it. Took out failed drive and replaced with spare, put back in, still reported drive bad, so to make sure, took spare out and put new spare in, also said it was bad, so said maybe something's wrong with caddy or slot, so tried to reboot RAID, and didn't know it was a RAID, forgot about the RAID volumes, and slot previously marked bad was marked absent regardless of drive or not, so reset to backed up settings, which caused it not to boot, were all worried for a couple days, but never tried booting without drive in that slot, and mitchb tried it tonight and reported that it successfully came up. mitchb: Don't think we catastrophically lost any data, though were pretty sure we lost all of it the other day. s4m: So, next step is new hardware restored to your settings? pweaver: Reading group after meeting if enough people. [adehnert lowers a shade] geofft: The office is darker now. geofft: Phasing out the sun. xavid: It's outdated. mitchb: That's a very polarized attitude to take. s4m: Webpage for sipbmp3 is down. ezyang: Yes, haven't quite gotten to that yet. s4m: It's linked from the SIPB homepage. Other: jhawk: There will be frisbee after the meeting on Kresge Oval. Other Other: geofft: App for the Guild game. The meeting was adjourned at 20:19. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.