Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 02/5/2007 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by jbarnold. In attendance were Voting members: jbarnold tabbott jhawk nelhage k_lai kchen yoz Associate members: jemorris mitchb hartmans asedeno Prospectives: geofft ternus spang Guests: | asmendel Treasurer's Report: jbarnold: Apparently, it was the case that on the 24th of January, SIPB purchased a container of helium for the Radio Society on jhawk's decision because the Radio Society was having difficulty getting the purchase done on the time scale they wanted, and we could acquire the cylinder more quickly than they could. So SIPB purchased this cylinder and now there's a rental fee of $2/month. The EC was not informed of this until today. mitchb: I am not okay with this. jbarnold: jhawk sent email right before this meeting. jhawk: At the time I did this, I expected this to be reversed in about a day or two, and then I realized that I needed to wait for the charge to post. In retrospect, I should have notified the EC before this. jemorris: Presumably they are going to pay for it now? jhawk: I don't expect it to last very long, but it hasn't been resolved yet. jbarnold: Just last month, tabbott and I talked with jhawk about taking more care with his treasurer duties, so we are particularly disappointed and upset that this transaction happened without the EC being informed until more than a week passed, and that the only reason we were notified was because it hadn't been resolved yet. I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to become some sort of purchasing gateway for student groups. I also don't know if IS&T would be thrilled with us doing that. tabbott: Frankly, this is completely unacceptable without prior notification and allocation. hartmans: I would have no problem with this if it were the EC's judgment, but it wasn't. We have sepcial cases like office supplies, but those have strings attached. But without such an allocation, I think there should be a hard line drawn that you have to get EC approval. jhawk: I move to censure the treasurer for his unallocated purchase and to allocate $60 for the container rental. geofft: I move to split the two parts. hartmans: I think we should do the allocation so that it will be in the books. mitchb: We should be paying $0. The Radio Society is supposed to pay for it. [motion to split the jhawk's motion passes] jhawk: I move to allocate $60 for this. jemorris: The board should extend a loan rather than an allocation. mitchb: Is this really appropriate to document this? hartmans: It is _absolutely_ better to document than to not document. geofft: It's arguable that the Radio Society helps to further the goals of SIPB, but it's a hard argument to make. [motion to extend a loan of $60 to the Radio Society passes] [motion to censure the treasurer fails for lack of a second] geofft: I move to censure the treasurer, since it seems that the motion failed because jhawk was the one who made it. jhawk: I made the motion because if the board was going to express displeasure, I wanted it to say it more clearly. hartmans: I think it's better to spend time on determining policy for the future rather than dwelling on what happened in the past. jhawk: I am reluctant to set policy based on this, but maybe that's poor of me. [7-0-5: motion to censure the treasurer jhawk passes] Chairman's Report: tabbott: There are elections next week. MIT Computing Report: tabbott: There was a websis outage earlier today. jhawk: There was an RT outage earlier this morning. This is the second such outage. w92-130-barracuda-1 also went down for some time last week. mitchb: The bootp problem has been resolved. What happened was, there were three dhcp servers, utilizing two different dhcp software versions (two are using a newer code base from 2006, and the other is using a code base from 1997). There was a bug in the forwarding of bootp requests not present in the older code base, but that server began to have problems with insufficient memory due to the size of its database. Once that server became intermittently available, bootp requests were no longer being forwarded properly and this resulted in the problems people saw. They have fixed the bug in the newer code base and things are once again working properly. Printers which improperly ended up with net 10 dhcp addresses should be "cold reset" in order to force them to obtain their configuration via bootp again. hartmans: nelhage has set up a barn-owl locker that essentially has owl that handles Jabber. It's at point where we'd like people to try it and report problems. SIPB Projects Report: geofft: What's happening with the DEFCON sign? jbarnold: I handed over the project to quentin, and he said he's busy, and it's on his list of things to take care of. geofft: Can we unhand it to quentin? jbarnold: Yes, but it's better done offline. Office Report: Office Cleaning Report: tabbott: There's a heap of stuff on the central table, not all of which seems transient. geofft: Last week, I made a motion about keeping Laptop Land clean. The motion said that anything left there for a week without identifying marks should be discarded at the discretion of anyone after a week. tabbott: I move to amend that it should be at the discretion of a SIPB member. jhawk: I don't see the difference when unlabelled things in the fridge get tossed out immediately. jemorris: I think things people leave in the communal fridge, people will more often label their food items, and when you leave it on a desk, it's a different story. tabbott: Temporary items shouldn't need to be labelled. THe one-week thing makes sense. hartmans: If someone chooses to throw out a one-week-old Thinkpad, they've done something wrong. I have two questions. One, is this a good idea? Second, is it good policy? I think it's a good idea in general. If anyone doesn't think it's a good idea, they should speak now. jbarnold: I think putting this in a motion is silly. Poeple should just exercise common sense. tabbott: Timestamping shouldn't be necessary since people who throw things away should be people who are here a lot. jhawk: I move to amend that the motion should read "The SIPB office should be clean and people should throw out junk." And by this point, I don't think this should be policy. geofft: Friendly amendment! mitchb: I move to table it indefinitely. jbarnold: Motion fails by lack of a second--before you can move it to table it indefinitely. [motion about Laptop Land's cleanliness fails for lack of a second] Publications Report: CokeComm Report: tabbott: We seem to be low on most things. jhawk: I sent mail to CokeComm but only about the Coke. Orientation Report: IAP Report: jbarnold: It's a year from yesterday. Other: kchen: I finished my MEng thesis on Friday. tabbott: A few friends of mine and I wrote a 32-line program that passed Battlecode this year. It was an easy 6 units and 6 EDPs. And it's like reasonable-looking Java. The robots don't move. jhawk: What does Robocraft do with all that money from sponsors? tabbott: Up until this year, they used to pay themselves a salary. They had a discussion with Course VI about how that's not going to happen again. This year, they gave out $30,000 in prizes, and they're probably going to have another discussion with Course VI about that's not going to happen again. hartmans: Maybe they should have bought helium. spang: As an update on what I talked about last week, the Ubuntu people are talking wiht the Media Lab, so we probably don't have to do much for that. There was some FSF-affiliated group that wants a classroom. They wanted meeting space to talk about free software stuff. hartmans: I would recommend that it would be reasonable as long as at least one SIPB person is going to go to the thingy. I think it's poor to give people classrooms if no MIT affiliates are involved at all. You get into problems if things get out of hand, etc. spang: Yeah, I'm going to get more details and such. Other Other: geofft: James Sherley still doesn't have tenure. mitchb: Those books by Tufte that jhawk mentioned previously are now available at the APO Book Exchange. jhawk: As a reminder, he's available in Boston for his talk. jbarnold: As a reminder, elections are next week. People should think about what officers you'd like to be or not like to be, and if you aren't going to be here, please send me email. The meeting was adjourned at 19:55. Minutes taken and submitted by k_lai.