Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-11-12 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk jbarnold jhawk mathmike rayhe tabbott wdaher yoz |||||| quentin Associate members: mitchb Prospectives: jesstess kaduk price wangaj Guests: Officer Reports: '() MIT Computing Report: yoz: aegisthus also had an AFS outage. tabbott: I think there were probably more of those polyphemus outages. SIPB Projects Report: tabbott: There was some work on the virtualization project last night. We fixed the connections-not-closing bug. wdaher: Linerva rebooted on Friday. tabbott: The CPU time consumed by people Owl processes has gone up by a factor of 10. They’re going to start reaching the 4 hour resource limit of CPU time. andersk: I suspect this is all the debugging options we compiled into the kernel. tabbott: The top CPU users didn’t used to be barnowl processes. price: Did the reboot have its intended effect? tabbott: We don’t have 100 processes in iowait. jhawk: Have any AFS servers crashed since Linerva rebooted? tabbott: Are you trying to blame Linerva for the AFS crashes? quentin: I move to buy a second 1 GB stick for coleco-sidewinder for up to $50. rayhe: Why are we only getting 1 GB? jhawk: I’d like to remind the board that the pronunciation is colēco with a long e. rayhe: I propose to allocate $200 for 2 2 GB sticks for…colèco-sidewinder. jhawk: *sigh* wdaher: Let’s do it! Get all the RAM! mitchb: When are we allowed to start making allocations against the sketchy rayhe fund of FY’09 RAM money? mathmike: I assume mariel-hemmingway is going away immediately? quentin: Yes. jbarnold: I think it would be cool for SIPB to cure cancer. mathmike: Move to allocate mariel-hemmingway to cure cancer. Office Report: tabbott: Chairs arrived at last. jhawk: It is getting to the point where there are arguably too many chairs in the office. I’m just suggesting it would be a bad idea to get new chairs. jwalden: I forgot to get to the fax machine yet again. I think it will happen in the next week and a half. andersk: Exponential backoff? tabbott: I met with John Morgante to talk about the drops in the SIPB office. He told us to give him a map. mitchb: As requested by quentin, I move to allocate up to $40 to obtain Guide to NumPy. tabbott: Is this an electronic document or a book? I’m curious what kind of DRM is on this if it’s not a book. wdaher: Looks like it’s an eBook of some sort. mitchb: quentin claims it is an unencumbered PDF. He’s going to deal with printing out a copy. Education Report: tabbott: There was going to be an Ask SIPB column on RCS. People complained a lot on Zephyr so that kaduk and geofft were dissuaded from publishing it. price: I think many people were not convinced that there’s any valid use for RCS as opposed to modern version control systems. jhawk: There’s this large mailing list called ask-sipb, and if they email the column out to it, they’re much more likely to get feedback. yoz: I think what jhawk meant to say is if they email the text of the column rather than a link to it… price: There’s a cluedump tonight on Debian packaging. Next week’s cluedump will be me talking about Haskell and static types. The following week’s cluedump will be by Dennis Baron on Voice over IP; he’s responsible for MIT’s deployment of VoIP. The following cluedump will be by Scott Aaronson on quantum computing. tabbott: Even if you don’t manage to get into that last cluedump spot, we have a huge number of hours for teaching classes over IAP. jbarnold: No, they’re in tight supply. You should request one immediately. Other: jhawk: I decided to ask the Computing Help Desk about my tickets in the queue. jis said they don’t have records of messages in June and told me to CC him. I’m not sure how I feel about this. jhawk: rayhe got an iPhone. Other Other: wdaher: I’m compiling Firefox. jwalden: Where are you in the build process? wdaher: GenericHTMLElement.cpp. jwalden: Ah, you’re still in content. wdaher: I’m going to be on jesstess’s radio show tonight. yoz: Can I filibuster the meeting? wdaher: A minor internet celebrity is my current arch-nemesis. We’ll leave it at that. jwalden: On the subject of Firefox, apparently it has fairly heavy memory fragmentation. price: Did somebody just figure this out? jwalden: We don’t actually leak all that many things. wdaher: Do you think it’s hard to generate fake words? jbarnold: I have some important thoughts on Bayesian vs. frequentist views that I’d like to share with the board.… jbarnold: …Excuse me, I have the floor.… jbarnold: …Dammit, where’s quentin? Screw this. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 19:59. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.