Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-04-02 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk aseering jbarnold jwalden nelhage quentin rayhe tabbott tilia wdaher yoz | jhawk k_lai xsdg Associate members: asedeno hartmans mitchb | srz Prospectives: ecprice mathmike Guests: Officer Reports: tabbott: Move to nominate mathmike for SIPB membership. He’s done office improvements, the stapler service outside, helped organize the books, runs course.mit.edu. <11-0-0, motion passes> tabbott: geofft complained that the UTF-8 minutes don’t have a byte-order mark. andersk: Um, UTF-8 doesn’t have a byte order. (Putting a BOM in UTF-8 text is a stupid Microsoft hack.) tabbott: Move to nominate jwalden for SIPB membership. jwalden has been a Firefox developer since before he was a freshman, and taught a Firefox extensions course for IAPs. <8-0-0, motion passes> MIT Computing Report: jhawk: There was a PO12 failure yesterday evening that resulted in mail to about 250 people not working and actually bouncing. mitchb: It was multiple different failures. There was the peachpuff failure and the chocolate failure. They were remedied at different times. jhawk: It was followed today by some sort of redundancy failure of a switch in W91 that caused almost everything to break. aseering: There was some problem with webmail. mitchb: The preferences database got corrupted and had to have its indexes rebuilt. SIPB Projects Report: wdaher: I bought a different ISO 14443 reader from a different guy and it’s on its way. tabbott: nelhage, me, jbarnold, andersk met with ISDA to talk about this virtualization project. It looks like they’re going to give SIPB some servers, one under a virtualization grant and another which they’re purchasing. jbarnold: Wilson is looking into what happened to our machine room budget. It sounds like they will set up a regular budget again. hartmans: It was entirely not clear to me what role I was in at that meeting (SIPB or ISDA). tabbott: Our hope is that hardware may be arriving in a few weeks. jbarnold: They should be pretty nice machines—Sun X4200s with two dual-core Opterons, 8 GB RAM. Office Report: nelhage: I got a whole bunch of new mice. They’re labeled. Hopefully these won’t wander away into our air conditioner system. jbarnold: Last week SIPB passed this policy that should be clarified. We should change “There shall be no violence in the SIPB office” to “there shall be no violence, horseplay, or other rambunctious physical contact of any kind in the SIPB office.” jhawk: I don’t think it behooves us to so precisely describe what conduct we proscribe. jbarnold: I think that horseplay should be included. jhawk: I’m also not entirely comfortable with prohibiting horseplay. jbarnold: Move to change it to “violence or horseplay”. <9-2-4, motion passes> tabbott: SIPB policy about having an informal policy for resolving interpersonal disputes. (See email.) Move to reinstate this policy. hartmans: This is definitely harmless and might be helpful. jhawk: The only reason we don’t have it is that there was some proposal for an amendment, and then it never got brought back up. srz: A lot of effort went into this policy. <14-0-1, motion passes. hartmans: At some future meeting, I plan on bringing up the other policy that I sent by email which is basically a policy on fair process. jbarnold has found two serious bugs in the policy and will propose fixes, so I will not make this motion tonight. I don’t care what the particular wording is, but I think it would be highly unfortunate if SIPB were unwilling to adopt some policy on fair process. This is another policy that we had and was garbage-collected. tabbott: There was some discussion about purchasing things like projectors or better chairs. tabbott: quentin is dealing with the chair that tried to kill rayhe. tabbott: Do people think a projector is a good idea? mitchb: I get the impression that we can do without it, but it’s the sort of thing that we would use if we had it. jhawk: I think it’s a waste of money. tabbott: Could you provide your reasons for that opinion? jhawk: I think we would use it extremely rarely, in situations where we could otherwise get a projector from elsewhere. I don’t think it’s worth spending $1000 on something we use twice a year. hartmans: I think it’s worth it anyway. srz: An oscilloscope is more hackish than a projector. I want to hear about instances people wanted a projector. hartmans: Giving ad-hoc talks for IAP classes, potentially for doing collaborative design work. tabbott: We considered doing cluedumps in the private dining rooms on the third floor. mitchb: Right, they don’t have any equipment unless you rent it from AV. jbarnold: Were the PDRs available? I thought they were reserved. tabbott: That’s a matter of planning. jhawk: Somewhat tangentially, one might ask why those rooms don’t have projectors. quentin: We’re sort of arguing about having a projector that we can take other places. Shouldn’t we have something that we can use as a screen in the office? tabbott: Maybe a screen to pull down over the whiteboard? hartmans: I think it would be bad for there to be for example regular movie watching in the office. jbarnold: If someone was willing to spec out the projector and deal with the screen, we should spend the money. mitchb: I don’t have experience with this, but I will put in effort with someone who does. rayhe: I can do it. rayhe: I will replace our remaining CRTs with LCDs. The one on quiche I want to replace with a 24″ Dell 2407 (1080p). quentin: We should preserve at least one CRT to preserve things like color accuracy. xsdg: I agree with quentin, given that for example on the color-calibrated LCD at the Tech, I’m still disappointed with the quality of the gradients. jbarnold: We also have four huge CRTs in the machine room that are almost never used. I don’t know what their quality is like. wdaher: I think we should at least get one for quiche. The 0.01% of the time you need high quality color, go use a CRT. But for the average use case, we should have an LCD. jhawk: I don’t think it’s reasonable to get an LCD and keep a CRT, because they both take up space. Any LCD we get should replace a CRT. xsdg: About table space, it’s often the case that getting LCDs doesn’t buy us much room. rayhe: We could mount bart on the underside of the table. nelhage: From the ceiling! tabbott: It sounds like we agree to get an LCD for quiche. hartmans: Move to allocate $770 to replace the CRT on quiche with an LCD, and if we are unable to get rid of it in some better way, to dispose of the CRT. quentin: Move to amend that to get rid of the worst CRT in the office. tabbott: We don’t need to argue about the exact text of this motion. jbarnold: Do we also want to replace one other CRT? We have three currently and now we’re down to two. jhawk: Color fidelity is important for the machine with the film scanner, and we don’t care about the Windows machine. Education Report: tabbott: A week from Friday, we’re having the SIPB Inode and fsck Block Party. Are people planning to show up? [hands] It looks like there’s a reasonable number of people. tabbott: There’s also a CPW activities fair some time. nelhage: Saturday, 1–3. Other: '() Other Other: andersk: I found the instruction where my BIOS disables virtualization. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 20:02. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.