Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 02/27/95 The meeting was called to order at ghudson by 19:30. In attendance were Voting members: ghudson shabby jhawk jered yoav cat nygren yonah hartmans fastcart | rjbarbal Associate members: xiphmont mhpower svalente yandros srz marc raeburn | sgw Non-voting members: Prospectives: rshah mwp mycroft@ai klmitch quijote hobbit cordelia elliot nathanw karat sipb7 | larryjd Guests: Secretary's Gratuitous Pre-meeting Comment: Help! I need a gratuitous pre-meeting comment! Treasurer's Report: she's not here, she's asleep. shabby: do you know if she finished her report? ghudson: I don't know. Chairman's Report: ghudson: I'm somewhat dissatisfied with how we're dealing with user questions sometimes when they come in the door. People should sit in the hotseats only if they want to answer questions. People should not pass off a question before they know what the question is. People should try at least a little to try to learn third-party software for answering questions. mhpower: I don't think it's appropriate for the SIPB to ordain what people sitting at the front should do. I don't think it's necessarily the case that people who sit there should answer questions, someone could be doing a project. yoav: You're sitting closer to the front, disconcerting for users to be shunted back. marc: Also, people don't usually need a machine near the door to do work. cat: There are also a lot of projects that can plain be done by logging in remotely. ghudson: It's been my impression that it's been traditional to put fast color machines closer to the door to encourage people to answer questions. yoav: One final point; we do have an SGI, we got it under the premise that we're going to compile stuff for it. If you're not compiling on it, and someone wants to, don't play games on it... ghudson: On a related note, the consultants have been seriously understaffed recently. I'd like to encourage people to become volunteer consultants; to do this, talk to Yoav or send mail to oconsult saying you're a SIPB member or prospective asking to become a volunteer consultant. Office Report: jhawk: we have an SGI. yoav: new naming scheme? it's currently known as opus. yandros: Because we have the new machine and it's in a bad position and because we might be getting better machines, people might want to think about reorging the office. I'll be bringing in the RT's when brian gets back to me. shabby: I'd like to try to bypass the name flamage that will occur; I move to change the name to l-h-putgrass. cat seconds. Vote is 3-many-0, fails. jhawk: People should remember to close the camera when they're done with it. yoav: It has a SCSI-2 CD-ROM drive. jhawk: The SGI came with juggling balls. Don't lose them. yandros: think we lost one. jered: we have a linux machine but we have no net card for it. yoav: I move to appropriate up to $150 for jered to get a 3c509 for it. yandros: Do we expect the machine to last that long? yoav: If the machine goes away we can put it in quiche, which has a 503. ghudson: we could also use it for a future PC that we might buy in the future. yandros: I don't think we should get a 3c509. yoav accepts a friendly amendment to allow for a network card which supports Linux and NetBSD. Seconded. Vote: many-0-4. svalente: I move we officially name the sparc5 portnoy. jhawk: seconded. white-balloted. svalente: I move we officially name the SGI opus. vote is 9-5-1, motion passes. nygren: a few more comments about the SGI. The CD-ROM drive should stay with the SGI. From the meeting with Greg Jackson, one of the things DCNS was concerned about was the potential for games on these things, they may pull them out if they're used excessively for games and stuff. marc: One of the major complaints that there's been about athena forever is that there's no good drawing programs. Is there anything there? Yes, offline. jhawk: The floor is wet. Don't do that. yoav: How would people feel if we could eventually convert a vax and an RT into a server in the machine room. marc: I think that if there's space in the office a head in here is nicer than a head in the machine room. yoav: the point is we don't have the space. yoav: Do people feel there's not enough room in the office? jhawk: I disagree that the room is overly crowded and I'd object to you moving them out of here into the machine room. svalente: I wouldn't object if we took the vaxen and RT's and threw them off the roof. I'd like to also point out that we recently voted to bring in two more RT's, which means people don't agree with me. cordelia: I haven't seen people use banana-sr. I think there are three more places for usable heads in the office before we need to start removing things. srz: I think our machine room space is limited, and we might find IS wanting us to reduce our use of machine room space in the future. yandros: I think the best way to deal may be to have people reorganize the office offline. xiphmont: the general usefulness of milo-I think milo has been hung ever since I got back from japan, and no one has noticed. yoav: re: machine room. There's a sun3 in there in a huge box. ghudson: we should not treat the machine room as our dumping ground (this doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't use the vaxes as servers). yoav: it's already completely crowded in here though. mhpower: I think another option is to get rid of the tables that have drawers since they effectively limit us to one position per table where we could get two. sgw: Something very real that just happened. fastcart just had a very difficult time leaving. Clutter tending to build up is very difficult. marc: I'd just like to see a straw poll of people who think we couldn't add a machine without removing machines even with some reorg. 9-8-4, people are pretty evenly split. yandros: Who knows about lnitp (xcluster machine) -> vax? ghudson: probably mhbraun or jweiss. MIT Computing Report: mhpower: Athena seems to now have a lambdamoo locker with files owned by Anne Salemme. ghudson: Sigh. hartmans: We're getting nearer the RS/6k test cycle and it might be going out in a couple weeks. Submit bug reports again about AIX 3.2.5. This will probably be the last time we really hit AIX for a long time. mhpower: should we exclude shared library version incompatibilities in our bug reports? Sam: no. yoav: people should check out sipb locker stuff. Computer Services: yoav: Anxiety-closet is doing something wrong. At some point in the near future I'd like to appropriate money for disk space for it or something... We'll see what we need to do. ghudson: Anything we buy for this year would have to come out of our operating budget, which has about $2000 in it for equipment. mhpower: the old Senator-Bedfellow may be going away soon. mhpower: anyone want to take over the reuse mailing list? Do we want to devote SIPB resources to it? yandros volunteers to take it over himself. SIPB Backup Report: nothing happened. srz: dunno about last week. yoav: I think AFS happened just after last week's meeting, and 2/5 other servers were backed up. People who want to help do backups should talk to yoav. Publications Report: sipb7: We could really use a Matlab document. ghudson: yoav started iMatlab at some point and never finished it. jhawk: Have we examined Essential Matlab? yoav: They added my changes for iMatlab and instead put it in eMatlab. We should just get copies of that. ghudson: We don't want all athena documents, but we can send mail to sendpubs about reasonable stuff. This is an accepted one. jhawk: I'll do so. jhawk: We have only a few iLaTeX's left. yoav: I move for $50 for a bunch of iLaTeX... yandros: I suggest someone check to see if it's up-to-date with the current LaTeX install. yoav: if they find problems? yandros: talk to me or bert. yoav: I move to allocate $50 for a version of iLaTeX after it's checked. jhawk: I disagree, we have enough to last a week. yoav withdraws motion. hartmans: What's the status of pubs being written? rshah: iInternet is about 3/4 done. cordelia: iCourtesy is about 1/2 done. iAthena has been run through once in a cleanup. iCyrillic has been completed by dimon and grisha. yoav: Our help page doesn't seem to reflect our current documents. If you know who I should talk to, talk to me after the meeting. yandros: I'll do it. rshah: someone's doing iDotfiles, iXresources. R/O Report: sipb7: I've gotten two words back on whether there's a summer publication or not; one said yes, one said no, and I told them to talk to each other. ghudson: We probably don't need to worry 'til May regardless. IAP Report: '() CokeComm Report: no coke. just ran out of root beer. Yay dkk, gamadrid is still jerk though. jered will talk to dkk about becoming partners in jerkdom. Other: sgw: A coworker of mine, Chris Stacy, is a SIPB prospective who has a direct conflict with the meetings. He's helpful, he's cool, say hi. jhawk: This meeting is being multicast across mitnet. mhpower: There was some mention of sending the SIPB meeting across the mbone? jhawk: no, mitnet. mhpower: Well, I don't think it's a good idea, it should stay in the office. nygren: I think you should make sure it's ok with everyone before you start broadcasting, even if it's just MIT. yoav: three things. 1) @(Richard and bylaws flamage) 2) I made a request of the sipb-ec to give Charles (mycroft) an account, but I forgot it was three _business_ days. 3) I forgot what the third was, I'll bring it up later. shabby: Athena/2 is out in beta. svalente: Rumors that Monty has been spotted in this country are completely unfounded. yoav: I think clue-dumps should be restarted and be rather public. Come talk to me after the meeting. Other Other: sgw: If anyone's graduating really soon and you're panicking about getting a job, let me know. cordelia: If anyone's graduating not really soon and you need a job, let me know. cat: The 6.170 pset for this week is about a 2-year-old snapshot of the rtfm archive file listing. quijote: Today was my first day at my real job; the real world is scary. (He's got a tie on!) rshah: Please don't leave prospectives in the office alone, it's hard to kick ourselves out. hartmans: this has happened and maybe it should be addressed. ghudson: Don't do this, although it's not the end of the world), but definitely don't ever leave the office empty with the door open. jweiss: getting the seige flu sucks, espesially when you didn't play in seige. cat: There's a lowercase jersey order that needs to be filled tonight. talk to me. hobbit: My site's finally up. avian.org. marc: I can get 1/2 megabit from bbn to my house but I can't get it the other way. sgw: I'm trying hard not to write Marc out of our security documents, but his 1/2 megabit may not be feasible anymore. The meeting was adjourned at 20:15:09. Minutes taken and submitted by shabby.