Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 04/10/2006 The meeting was called to order at 7:30PM by jbarnold. In attendance were Voting members: jbarnold tabbott kchen presbrey arolfe | jhawk Associate members: jtu asedeno kenta golem | ike Prospectives: k_lai andersk mathmike | jwalden cfdoming Guests: Treasurer's Report: tabbott: Treasurer's not here. kenta: Request for treasurer's report. jhawk: I would need more time to get good numbers, but to my recollection, we have upward of $600, possibly substantially more. kenta: I'd like a report next time on how much we have allocated and not allocated. jhawk: That is my intent; in the meantime, you can look at the spreadsheet in /afs/sipb/admin/treasurer. Chairman's Report: jbarnold: I've got nothing. MIT Computing Report: tabbott: web.mit.edu was sad for being slashdotted. asedeno: ca2.mit.edu was down over the weekend. jhawk: Netops has problems with its virtual server nature; fixed by Jeff who suggested using jabber to escalate response when communicating problems in the future. SIPB Projects Report: arolfe: I'm working on making a wiki that uses moira lists as groups for authentication. jtu: How is this different from what we have right now? arolfe: There is no authentication for a wiki on scripts, so you can't restrict who sees a set of papers, etc. jbarnold: Of course, we should add this functionality to scripts. kenta: I am working on getting Condor to work on athena, a platform for parallelizing computations across multiple computers. I'm having problems, so if anybody's interested in helping out, please come talk to me. tabbott: My 115 project may be an electronic display for defcon, but no guarantees. presbrey: Number of mysql users is 259, users on scripts almost 600. jbarnold: "Users" is misleading, it's more like content providers. arolfe: bloom-beacon is up. kchen: I'm not in charge of this, but askSipb published. tabbott: It would be nice if when asking asksipb for comments, it did not act like a black hole. cfdoming: Thunderbird 1.5 should be up in about a week. Office Report: kenta: I burned a whole bunch of Knoppix 4.0.2 CDs and put them in the folder by the door. asedeno: Knoppix 5 should be out in a couple weeks. kenta: Last time Knoppix said something would be out in a couple weeks, it took them months. Office Cleaning Report: jbarnold: The office in theory was cleaned a couple hours ago. It was determined that there were enough people in the office, so obviously the office was cleaned, right? golem: Couldn't find "How Buildings Learn" in the bookshelf, but there is an apple tart. jbarnold: That's mine. golem: I don't really care for the apple tart, but "How Buildings Learn" should come back. jbarnold: There were these books in the freezer, and I'm recommending either getting rid of them or figuring out what to do with them. kenta: I move that we move them to the bookshelf. jtu: If we put them in the freezer, I thought we did that because they were water-damaged and doing so would prevent mildew. kenta: It is a frostless freezer. Some of them have dried out, and those I put back into the bookcase. A couple are still wet. ike: The longer they stay in the freezer, the more they will dry out? kenta: Yes. jbarnold: If we are improving their condition by leaving them in the freezer, that's fine. Publications Report: jbarnold: I think Publications is okay. CokeComm Report: jbarnold: I think they're okay too. Orientation Report: tabbott: We had a Midway. jbarnold: Yes, I've got 12 email addresses of people, and pointing them to what sipb does. We might want to get prefrosh involved in projects over the summer since they might have more time then before arriving in the fall. IAP Report: Other: jtu: I think because Alex has had his last cubic birthday in a while (27), we should sing happy birthday to him. everybody: sings the Happy Birthday song; kenta yells out "arolfe" when everyone else sings "Alex" kenta: I factored the 10th number in Sylvester sequence (which is used to prove the infinitude of primes) into a 44-digit number and a 156-digit number, which took about 2 months on milquetoast. It's an interesting number. presbrey: I work at this place called Sconex that just got bought by Alloy for somewhere between 8 and 10 million, depending on who you ask. If you want a job there, just let me know. They do distributed web services. Other Other: jtu: When's the Chair's birthday? jbarnold: Why do you ask? jtu: For the minutes. jbarnold: Wednesday. I'm going to turn 21. asedeno: MIT apparently acquired a cannon. Though it's gone now. The meeting was adjourned at 7:45PM. Minutes taken and submitted by k_lai.