Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 05/3/2004 The meeting was called to order at 19:30:13 by jtu In attendance were Voting members: kenta jbarnold jtu merolish kchen arolfe | golem Associate members: ocschwar rjbarbal belmonte wjh | alex_c Prospectives: | zoz Guests: barax (== "Zoz's brother") Treasurer's Report: arolfe: We haven't been billed for Athena fees, which typically are $5000. Beyond that we have $5000 to spend before June. jtu: I asked jis if he knew where are budget comes from. He doesn't know. Chairman's Report: '() Office Report: kenta: merolish says one can make the air vent behind the couch shut up its high pitched whine is by turning the knob to warm for a few seconds and then turn it back to cold. arolfe: I want to throw the sparc5's on the rack off the roof. jtu: We have a whiteboard. jhawk: ...courtesy of sgw. jtu: I want an allocation for $400 for a microwave oven. belmonte: Jen, it's like this: look at the cans in the back of the office. Now think what'll happen to a microwave oven. jhawk: Where should we put it? [jhawk calls the question] [objection] [jhawk moves the question] <4-6-3> motion of the question fails. merolish: We should offer it as a SIPB service. alex_c: I propose a friendly amendment for surveillance gear from the excess of the $400, to see who's making the mess. [accepted] ocschwar: There is one 2 floors down. belmonte: This thing is going to become a steaming pile of shit. <5-4-3> motion passes. [jtu: allocation $400 for microwave and surveillance gear] Office Cleaning Report: kenta: I failed to spill chili all over keyboard, because I was using a keyboard cover. belmonte: We just allocated money for a microwave oven. It's going to get worse. MIT Computing Report: jhawk: MIT suffered a power outage, caused by Cambridge and NSTAR, from 13:10 till 16:45-ish, depending where you were on campus. zoz: The wireless access points in Senior House and (somewhere else) were on emergency power. I could see my Athena homedir. jhawk: All the SIPB servers, including the SIPB AFS cell, were up because of the generator, but down because of lack of network. We've known about this problem for a while. We should bring this up with IS, possibly when arolfe talks to jis. We need to put UPS's in the telecom closet but network won't let us. Computer Services: arolfe: jgrochow heard that www is not run by IS&T. he talked to jis who talked to jtu. Four years ago cmvest found out the same thing, and we started mirroring the top-level page of web.mit.edu. If IS&T takes over www, we are worried that they will break a lot of things, for example that www/foo and web/foo are different. What should we do? The extremes are: (1) Hand it to them no string/questions asked, and all the mail going to webmaster, or (2) Not hand it to them until they give us a very clear plan for migrating or maintaining all the services on www and differences of www versus web. belmonte: Last time this came up, we were politically less than graceful. One of SIPB's roles is to support new services that I/S does not support. Back in the day, when www was one of a few web servers in the world, www was an appropriate service for SIPB to maintain. It's important for SIPB to keep I/S happy; we might want to think of a graceful exit strategy. rjbarbal: We were politically graceful. MIT and IS screwed us over. Forcing a student server to display official pages is like forcing the Tech to print Tech Talk's articles. There should be a student web service with student-oriented services. As advocates for student computing we should stand up for this. belmonte: I recall discussion around the office, last time this came up, to the effect that one of the reasons we ended up mirroring web's top-level page was that www's was lame. rjbarbal: No. It was because people expected www.mit.edu to be an official page, not a student page. zoz: There were people who believed that the SIPB page was lame. jtu: jis wants to deal with a single individual, who is reasonably diplomatic. merolish: What's the summary of www, why we have it? rjbarbal: www was one of the first hundred web sites in the world, etc. etc. Before MIT itself decided to get a website, we had www. arolfe: SIPB should have a home page that is useful to students. And hook freshmen into using it. golem: Looks like we have a volunteer. arolfe: I want prospectives to do it. I'll take credit. Mua ha ha. belmonte: Are you practising to be someone's advisor? arolfe: Hush Matthew. jbarnold: What'll break? arolfe: Tildes will break, some cgi stuff will break and scripts, comment service, geographic name server. ocschwar: something about free from the obligation to mirror web. jbarnold's scripts.mit.edu. zoz: but so little has been done on the sipb home page rjbarbal: We don't have motivation since nobody looks at it. jtu: I call a vote of confidence for arolfe's representation of SIPB to jis. jtu: Straw poll -- let I/S take care of it? Which services specific to www do we really want to keep? golem: Separate from the two extremes arolfe mentioned, we can also just destroy www by chucking if off the roof and see what happens. zoz: www's finger is useful to me. jhawk: We should strongly ask to maintain all the top level content. golem: All links should go to fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu as a condition of handing it over. arolfe: Who wants to help me? < ocschwar jbarnold rjbarbal raise hands> rjbarbal: I don't want to deal with I/S. Publications Report: '() Orientation Report: '() IAP Report: '() CokeComm Report: jtu: I'm going to kill something that is alive in the fridge. I hope it's not someone's pet. Other: '() Other Other: belmonte: Just because someone grew up in Australia wrestling crocodiles doesn't mean that they can triumph in a frictionless environment. alex_c: Fuck you. And your stock portfolio too, just like on WWF. The meeting was adjourned at 20:00. Minutes taken and submitted by kenta.