Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 10/4/2004 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by jtu. In attendance were Voting members: kenta kchen ike jbarnold foley jtu golem | arolfe Associate members: asedeno xela deberg nim fustflum hartmans lnemzer jmorzins | tlyu ocschwar Prospectives: aerynne mshaw zev paigep bgelb yushin xsdg blo Guests: Treasurer's Report: jtu: he's at an LSC meeting. arolfe: i don't have the spreadsheet in front of me. kchen: we have 437 left to allocate arolfe: that assumes we pay for all the IP addresses we have nim: what's the the consequence of over budget? arolfe: depends on how much. $100 no one would care, $1000 people would notice. Chairman's Report: hartmans: we have secretary. we should make sure he does enough work. jtu: i am going to an is&t meeting. tell me of things you want discussed, i already have some things. jtu: very special EC meeting Tuesday, place to be determined. hartmans: is there a public agenda? jtu: we are doing things to make cruft twitch, changing the constiution about how long you need to be a member to be an officer. jtu: also, wrote mail to prospectives and members about things they can do. i will respond to them sometime. keithw: you should have said assume the position. jtu: uh next time. On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Keith Winstein wrote > What actually happened was this: > > ====================================== > jtu: (to paigep) Assume the position. > > > > keithw: Please don't say it like that. > ====================================== [but the secretary feels his version of events is more accurate] golem: how long is rm? paigep: forever? hartmans: give the spiel. paigep: sipb has projects, the office has resources at your disposal, sipb has mailing lists, zephyr classes, machines have stuff running on them. interested, talk to a member. kenta: what was your slackware experience this summer like? paigep: it was hard. there's a lot of hand-editing configuration files. jhawk: a user's wireless card is working but is not getting dhcp on his/her laptop. paigep: ask zephyr class. google. jhawk: it was discussed on zephyr today. go to the l33t interface at nic.mit.edu/dhreg/support and see if they've been deactivated by stopit. golem: how do find out who fixes what and what runs where? paigep: it's on the wall golem: also it's in the files who_fixes_what and what_runs_where in [the info locker]. fustflum: tell more about your slackware experience, and how it can be improved. paigep: installing on a laptop; it was my first linux experience. one of the reasons it sucked that the documentation on slackware website was not up to date. ike: where do you go or send people if you don't know the answer? paigep: rcc, zephyr, come back another time. ike: rcc, chd, olc, sipb@mit.edu. hartmans: asking people another time is not that great an idea. xela: ask a question that i don't know the answer. paigep: what's my middle name? xela: she wins! paigep: eileen (?) foley: there's been complaints of a hobo who's taken up residence in an athena cluster. paigep: ask them to leave, try to find someone more intimidating. foley: call the CP: they might be a grad student. jtu: what to do other people think about sipb? paigep: most people don't know about sipb. sipb people are people too. i'm telling my fellow frosh about us. jhawk: a user asks for a class on "really basic stuff" in addition to the really complicated stuff that we normally teach. would you be willing to teach this class? paigep: i don't know if I'll be around for iap. deberg: what have you done? paige: showed up on zephyr in the summer. tattoos, htgamit ad. jtu: how many female members has sipb had, and how many can you name? paige: i can name jtu sly cfox. jtu: we've had 20-25. jbarnold: out of 235 we sent invitations to for reunion. golem: who was jtu before jtu was jtu? paige: tĂș jhawk: so you've done a lot of advertising. speak about it. paigep: unfortunately i haven't noticed advertising except for when I'm looking for it. the lsc slides are all right. kenta: name something you believe is possible to do in athena that you don't know how to do. paigep: I'd like to learn how to use different window managers. deberg: what things should we advertise? paigep: services, iap classes, can't think of anything else. hartmans: is sipb fairly intimidating? and what can we do about it? paigep: it was kind of intimidating. it takes time. i spent the summer watching the zephyr class. that helped a lot. jtu: what do you think the goals of SIPB should be? paigep: improve computing at MIT and people's experience. having a place where people can wander in and ask questions does a lot. improve computing at MIT, and thus increase happiness. jbarnold: what has been your experience with athena as a new user? paigep: nifty jhawk: [long winded question] ... usability ... athena ... blah. paigep: making athena more useful is good, but don't take away the old-fashioned way of using the command line. jtu: who asks the most silly questions in meeting? paigep: i haven't been to a lot of meetings. kenta: what is your favorite office head? paigep: pickled-herring. it's fun to climb up onto the monolith. xela: move that deberg ask the question. deberg: i'm not old enough to ask the question. deberg: [to paigep] are you registered to vote? paigep: i'm not old enough to vote! [someone]: move that tlyu ask the question. tlyu: why do you want to be a sipb member? paigep: it's a useful organization and i'd like the opportunity to work on more stuff. <8-0-1, paigep membered> Office Report: jtu: has anyone seen the canned air we just ordered? or staple removers from long ago? kenta: quiche is running low on disk space. i'd like to allocate $150 for a new hard drive. [someone]: what about cleaning up the space on the drive? kenta: I talked to the biggest users of disk space and didn't get too far. there has been some cleaning up, but not sufficient. a machine like quiche, being used for video and for big computations, it needs to have a large amount of swap space and scratch space. [5-1-something, motion passes] jhawk: move to deallocate card writer to give us more budget flexibility. we allocated for it in a time when we had lots of money left over, but we didn't spend it then. zev: could we resell? nim: reselling MIT property is hard. fustflum: and I don't think we'd want to resell it. jhawk: an amendment to postpone the purchase until FY 2006. <3-many-some, amendment fails> xela: i see a $550 card reader for sale on ebay. <6-5-6 motion passes> Office Cleaning Report: ike: someone left a kitkat on top of the monolith. MIT Computing Report: arolfe: webmaster has many pregenerated png files Computer Services: jbarnold: would like 80 dollars to get a replacement battery for the UPS to attach to steve-dallas. [big-1-(2 or 3), motion passes] keithw: lamp target date is oct 15. we need to open 1600 CDs and i need help. i've cut myself already so i've sacrificed my own blood to this project. golem : you need to organize a distributed peer to peer network of CD unwrapping and opening. Publications Report: jtu: we look ok. Orientation Report: IAP Report: jtu: come plan the wireless scavenger hunt thurs at 7pm. also i need to reply to the FBI guy. CokeComm Report: aerynne: i'm going to get more coke. Other: Other Other: jtu: [something about karate kata and pressure points] hartmans: linux on new powerpc hardware sucks golem: karate belt testing kenta: sox made the playoffs. The meeting was adjourned at