Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-05-28 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: nelhage tabbott aseering quentin danjared jhawk k_lai tilia | rayhe wdaher kchen Associate members: asedeno | deberg mitchb Prospectives: Bill Hartnett (hartnett@alum) Guests: Officer Reports: tabbott: We have a membership election for spang. tilia: We have money. Spend some, not too much. I can’t exactly explain how much money we have. Try again next week. tabbott: Let us know when you find out. tilia: If you have money allocated, you should spend it to buy stuff, or let me know. tabbott: We have quorum for the election. Christine, could you tell us a bit about yourself? spang: I’ve been involved in SIPB in various ways since I got here. I work on debathena, and am a Debian developer; I hang out in the office whenever I’m in the office. Bill Hartnett: Why do you want to be a member? spang: Isn’t that the last question? I’ll defer it for now. danjared: What’s your user id? spang: 40-something? tabbott: How would you find out? spang: id? quentin: A user comes in with a hard Windows question. How do you deal? spang: I’d try zephyr. If no one replies, I’d tell them to mail sipb@ jhawk: How do you feel about printing on Athena? (Intentionally broad question) spang: It sucks? I like being able to print without fees. It has its problems, including clueless users, and can be abused, but I like it. I appreciate the lack of hard limits on our use of resources. danjared: If there were no one in the office except you, and deberg had just walked out to the restroom, would you, through action or inaction, make sure deberg’s laptop wasn’t stolen? spang: I think I would make sure no one walked off with his laptop…. It’s common courtesy, like if you’re at Tosci’s, and someone asks you to watch their stuff. mitchb: If you’re the last one to leave Tosci’s at night, what do you do? spang: Actually, I once left a bag of clothes at Tosci’s late at night, and had to go back…luckily, there was still someone there. wdaher: What do you think of the wall-mounted stapler outside the office? spang: It’s good. People seem to be afraid to come into the office. tilia: Who was tabbott before jbarnold was jbarnold? spang: That was horribly phrased. jtu, maybe? jhawk: What do you think of the logical extension of the stapler outside the office? e.g. staplers at other clusters? For instance, the other day I saw a stapler in the 16 cluster. spang: That seems excessive. Refilling and restocking them seems like a lot of work. I suppose if someone wants to, that’s great. danjared: What if it were branded as the “One Stapler Per Cluster” project? spang: I hate you. mitchb: geofft asks how you double space in Debian. spang: What?! Debian isn’t a text editor! Use vim, I guess? jhawk: But *how!?* mitchb: Hit enter twice! quentin: Hey, I actually want to know! spang: I don’t know of a specific mode. danjared: Just update your alternatives for spacing! aseering: You’ve worked on the debathena project a lot; Are there other projects you’re interested in but haven’t been able to get to? spang: Hmm. I think mostly stuff related to debathena; There’s still a lot of stuff broken there. deberg: SIPB’s seemed to have had this renaissance of new interesting projects recently. This wasn’t always true. Do you have thoughts on how to preserve this? spang: I think part of it is not being totally critical about new ideas, and being encouraging to freshmen and prospectives, and poking them to actually carry through. quentin: What should SIPB do to get more women in SIPB? spang: Make the cruft hang around less, seriously. I think just having a critical mass of women would make things easier. Computing culture in general has this problem, not just SIPB. deberg: How did you end up here? spang: I guess I heard of the debathena project. I guess danjared poked me over the summer. I just thought it was a cool place. wdaher: What is mega-man’s root password? quentin: At what point will it become the office root? spang: Hopefully by the end of the summer. When it works right. We should have hackathons over the summer. tabbott: When’s our next hackathon going to be? nelhage: Shouldn’t you be asking me? spang: I’ll be here most of the summer. danjared: Do you have any opinions about alternative window managers? Would you like more to be available to Athena? spang: I’m trying to make ion work. It’s kinda a pain. I use it on my laptop. It’d be nice if the author weren’t a jackass. nelhage: We totally need an xmonad build for Athena. spang: Do you *like* recompiling your window manager to change configuration? spang: There must be more questions. You’re all lame. asedeno: What do you think of Debian live, and can we athenize it? spang: Probably, although I have minimal experience with it. I hear it’s better than it used to be, and is very customizable. jhawk: Ask some non-lame questions. wdaher: That’s not a question! jhawk: Why haven’t you asked any non-lame questions yet? spang: Because you’re supposed to ask me questions! tabbott: Ask someone in the room a technical question to which you know the answer and to which you think they don’t. spang: Hmm. I need to think of a good one. Waseem, if you were maintaining a Debian package, and upstream changed names, how would you deal? wdaher: I’d do the thing where you have the old package, but it actually installs the new one. spang: You’d make a new package, but generate a dummy old package that depends on the new one. tabbott: What’s the difference between Depends and Pre-Depends? spang: Pre-Depends means it has to be installed and completely configured before you can start doing anything with the new package. This is discouraged because it can cause weird infinite loops and sad behavior. tabbott: You can have Depends: cycles, and it works; You can’t with Pre-Depends. tabbott: Name all the office heads you can. spang: portnoy, cutter-john, mega-man, between the macs—mariel-hemmingway, and I forget the other, I never use it, quiche-lorraine, deathtongue, binkley, I forget the dual head. kchen: What do you think an automated upgrade from RHEL4 to Ubuntu would look like? spang: I kinda wanted to run away screaming the first time I read that idea. I think I still want to. Especially since Ubuntu releases have problems upgrading between themselves. jhawk: Do you have an alternative? spang: They should stop wanking about needing support, and use Debian. jhawk: Doesn’t that not solve the upgrade problem? spang: I suppose. It’d need a lot of careful thought. tabbott: Name your favorite three SIPB projects. spang: debathena, linerva, and scripts. I was going to say sipbv6, but I don’t actually care. wdaher: Well, now I *have* to ask what your three least-favorite SIPB projects are. spang: Well, if they’re just least favorites, I wouldn’t even know their names. nelhage: What SIPB services do you think are a waste of time and effort? danjared: *cough*binkley*cough* spang: The Defcon sign? glasser: You say having less cruft presence might make SIPB more inviting (If I’m not putting words in your mouth). What’s a good role for alumni and other cruft in SIPB? spang: That’s a good question. Maybe we should have events where we hang out with cruft and alumni. deberg: Would you like me to leave? I’m serious, I just sorta showed up, and I realized I sympathize with what you’re saying. Should we have a signup or something? I think you’re right, but I don’t see it changing without deliberate effort. spang: I’m not really sure I’m prepared to answer that right now. wdaher: What candy do you want that Cokecomm doesn’t have? spang: I’m not sure, because I’m going to be annoying and vegan. Can we discuss this offline? asedeno: barnowl? spang: yes tabbott: barnfs? spang: Does it exist? tabbott: No… spang: Then no. quentin: geofft reports he is now discouraged from doing any work on VAX machines. tabbott: She totally called it an office head! I’m not sure why you’re complaining. Bill Hartnett: Why do you want to be a member? spang: So members will stop being wrong when they assume I’m a member and start talking about the office root in my presence. Also, it’d be nice to be able to vote. And have a key for when I forget my stuff in here. [spang elected 18-0-1] MIT Computing Report: tabbott: Apparently nothing broke this week. mitchb: I ported discuss to krb5. It is coming with us into the bold new krb5 world. It’s currently in testing, and should be in the source tree in a week or two. Ask me if you want bits to test it; I’d appreciate it if people would do so. jhawk: Is there a flag day, or does the server support both, or what? mitchb: Currently, it tries krb5, and then asks the server for the version, and tries again with krb4; It should be backwards compatible both ways. mitchb: Although we’re not delivering mail with spam scores higher than 25, STRING recipients (e.g. discuss archives) seem to still receive them. SIPB Projects Report: quentin: Motion to allocate $70 for 20×7′ CAT-6 cables for the machine room for scripts and the virtualization project. tabbott: Aren’t those kinda short? quentin: Sam recommended the length for the machine room. I could get some longer ones. jhawk: How many do you intend to use? You should get more than you intend to use. quentin: Change that to $80 for 15×7′ and 5×14′ tabbott: Second [Motion passes, white ballot] tabbott: mega-man had some hardware issues asedeno: We’re not sure what happened, but the filesystem ate most of the files on the system. Also, it was complaining about the optical device, but disabling it in the BIOS fixed things, without breaking it. We reinstalled, but lost the host key and the keytab. aseering: snork continues to rsync the Ubuntu mirror over. It’s copied about 300G over the course of a week. The website claims the total size is about 200G. nelhage: barnowl will finally push a new build to the locker this week! Office Report: tabbott: There’s a lot of crap in the office. People should clean up after the meeting. jhawk: Spacebars hate me. The spacebar on yaz-pistachio is missing a spring, and the spacebar on portnoy is similarly malfunctioning, but not missing a spring. asedeno: Actually, it’s not missing a spring, but was improperly seated; I’ve fixed the problem. deberg: How would people feel about having a spare mac power brick in the office? [quentin pulls one out] Education Report: mitchb: I restocked the office on cluster cards and information packets. They tell me sendpubs@ is still the correct address to email, but it got forwarded to ist-pubs@, which seems like a better place. As it turns out, we had hundreds of extras in the extra documentation drawer. They’re almost out, but they wanted to know how many we go through each year, so they can print enough for us. Someone should figure this out. tabbott: I thought we checked that! jhawk: There was a minor revision of iLaTeX. No new copies were made. tabbott: People interested in SIPB’s various educational things, including IAP and cluedumps, should contact me. Other: '() Other Other: wdaher: If you know someone who wants to sublet their appartment in Manhattan to me for the summer, you should let me know. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 20:26:13. Minutes taken and submitted by nelhage.