Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-06-18 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by nelhage. In attendance were Voting members: andersk asedeno jbarnold jhawk nelhage presbrey Associate members: | ocschwar Prospectives: price Guests: Officer Reports: nelhage: We got mail from tilia about how much money we have. We have about $1000 left. Still no news on Athena fees, although she has tried calling the people who are supposed to know about them. This is assuming that the $475 we allocated for the Tor project is not going to be spent. We should spend certainly at least that much money, and maybe a little more. jbarnold: If people have ideas for projects they want to do, they should figure out what they want. jhawk: The deadline is not exactly the next to week. Things need to be delivered and packing slips delivered to the financial people well before the end of the month. nelhage: Anyone have suggestions? jhawk: We can be happy to tell the treasurer to buy as much toner as she wants to buy. jbarnold: How much for each cartridge? jhawk: About $80. jbarnold: Okay, we’ll plan on getting a couple cartridges. I don’t think we should plan on spending $1000 on that; we should continue brainstorming. nelhage: Move to ask tilia to buy as much toner as she fills appropriate. MIT Computing Report: asedeno: The zone cell was rooted by five more people. SIPB Projects Report: andersk: We had a hackathon yesterday. I worked on Debathena, and everyone else was lazy. nelhage: I was talking to tabbott, and it seems like hackathons have turned into an excuse to eat food. It would be nice if people were encouraged to actually work on projects. price: So says the vice chair who spent half the hackathon playing nethack. nelhage: Right. So I would propose an amendment to the policy that we passed allocating the money for these hackathons, stating that during a SIPB projects hackathon called in this way, members and prospectives in the SIPB office should primarily be working on SIPB projects. nelhage: This is intended to make it official and clear that the hackathons are for working on projects. There’s nothing in the wording of the first motion we passed to this effect. kchen: Are you encouraging productivity, or discouraging people who aren’t working from coming into the office? nelhage: Sort of, yes. It tends to be nonproductive when lots of people aren’t working. price: So the existing policy just says they’re called hackathons. price: The thing I don’t want this to do is discourage people from coming if they don’t already have a specific project to work on. Part of the purpose should be a way for people to get into new projects. nelhage: I agree that hackathons should be a way for that to happen. Would you have an alternate wording suggestion? Certainly the current situation in which there tends to not be a lot of work going on tends to make it at least as hard to get involved in new projects. nelhage: This motion only concerns the hackathons. price: So how about if it just says that “the purpose of the hackathon is for members and prospectives to work on SIPB projects”, rather than saying something directed at individual members and prospectives that are present. I think this will give the clarification that you want, without having to know in advance what projects you’re going to work on. Is that a friendly amendment? nelhage: Sure. presbrey: I was here at the hackathon briefly, doing my own projects. Most of you guys were here. It seems like a really lame motion, mostly because the people that should have been fixing the issue are the ones here voting on this. price: I think it’s harmless to say what a hackathon is. nelhage: I agree that it was many of us here that should have been working on stuff, but I still think it’s good to clarify what a hackathon is. presbrey: Are you against spending money for food for a social meeting of SIPB members? nelhage: No, I’m saying that that’s not the purpose of this particular policy—the automatic $75 allocation for the vice chair to call hackathons two days in advance. presbrey: The only change that’s being made is to define hackathon? nelhage: Yes. nelhage: We received the new RAM for Linerva. We memtested it; it passed several tests with no errors. We will be scheduling an outage to install it some time next weekend. asedeno: It will now have 12 GiB? nelhage: Right. jhawk: And less uptime. asedeno: So we need to reboot multics while we’re at it. jbarnold: geofft, for the VoIP project that he’s starting with quentin, would like a PCI card that allows you to plug in an analog phone line. This is going to be $150 or $250 plus shipping. It seems reasonable for us to allocate enough for the $250 thing. geofft would like to move to allocate up to $300 for this phone card. Office Report: jhawk: I was going to suggest that we finally buy the CF card for the oscilloscope. But it’s now very find to hard it (PS2MEM which costs about $380). nelhage: Before the hackathon on Sunday, there was an office cleaning party attended by tabbott and one other member (I forget who). The office was cleaned. These tables gather really disgusting amounts of filth when they’re left uncleaned for weeks at a time. It would be useful for us to figure out some mechanism for getting the office cleaned regularly. There were loud objections to reintroducing the fish, but even when tabbott called the cleaning nobody showed up. nelhage: There has been talk about acquiring a signal generator for the office, to go with the scope. I have no idea offhand how much that would cost. Do people want to make a motion and take care of purchasing one? jhawk: How much do we have left? nelhage: Roughly $700 minus any unexpected variation in Athena fees. jhawk: It seems that you can get a cheap one in the $200–$600 range, and a .002 lab–class one in the $1500 range. presbrey: I was going to replace the Sun machine that has our sipb-mp3 print spooler with a Linux machine that we could put new software on to allow us to play new formats. nelhage: Do we have a Linux machine lying around? Was scripts planning on getting some of the spare ops machines to replace the LVS machines? jbarnold: I think quentin was going to do that. presbrey: Move to allocate up to $600 for a Linux machine to replace xcb as our print spooler. jbarnold: If people have better ways to spend the money, I think it’s probably the case that we can dig up a machine for this purpose. jhawk: I think if we could find a random machine, then toner would be a better use for the money. jbarnold: Storing 12 boxes of toner seems like a waste of money, because space is money is time is… aseering: Is it worth waiting another minute or three to see if anyone else has suggestions? jhawk: I’m looking at function generators. Maybe another distinction is whether they can only generate sin waves. jbarnold: People have discussed before that we should have random cables around the office that might not count as office supplies. Does anyone remember these needs arising? Sounds like no. jhawk: I have a proposal. I propose that… jbarnold: Please hold for John Hawkinson… jhawk: I move that we allocate $450 for a 20 MHz signal generator. It does sin waves, square waves, triangle waves. aseering: It seems like a generally good idea and a useful thing. nelhage: Seems like a good thing to have around the office. ocschwar: I would propose that we buy FPGA kits. jbarnold: Those are the competitors to computers! We’re a *computing* board! nelhage: Can we get an abacus? jhawk: We had an abacus, it was called the coprocessor. <6-0-1, motion passes> nelhage: Those allocations plus toner are probably sufficient to use up our remaining funds. jbarnold: We can probably fit in a book or two if anyone wants to get a book. Education Report: nelhage: It looks like we’re running low on iLaTeX. nelhage: tabbott still hasn’t received any emails about volunteers to coordinate either IAP or another series of cluedumps. If you’re interesting in taking charge of SIPB computer tours, or organizing a series of cluedumps, or making IAP happen, send mail to tabbott. We need people to make those happen. The cluedumps were very successful last year, the IAP classes are fun, and computer tours were very successful in recruiting freshmen. Other: '() Other Other: jhawk: I would like someone to tell me how to measure the voltage of a 47 volt Zener diode. jhawk: Paul Horowitz has announced that he’s starting work on Horowitz and Hill. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 20:06. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.