Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-12-17 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk arolfe ctl jbarnold jesstess jhawk mathmike nelhage presbrey price quentin rayhe tabbott wdaher yoz | geofft Associate members: asedeno | mitchb Prospectives: broder ecprice kaduk tvald Guests: alya Officer Reports: tabbott: We have some elections later in the meeting. jhawk: Next week’s meeting falls on Christmas Eve, and the student center is closed. We should make alternate arrangements. tabbott: Is there someone here that will be here at the meeting next week? jhawk: If there’s going to be someone on campus, that person could have the meeting whenever they want. tabbott: Otherwise I can have it at my house. jbarnold: Windsington South? tabbott: Okay, we’re going to have a special meeting with no business at my house, a week from today. tabbott: I think the following meeting also falls on a time that W20 is closed. jhawk: I’ll be here. nelhage: Me too. jhawk: Let’s have it in Lobby 7. We can use tin cans and string. ecprice: I’m Eric Price. I’ve hung around very occasionally for a couple years. I’m a junior now. This fall I started getting involved in sipb-xen when tabbott dragged me in. I’ve hung around the office, got zsr working at native resolution. kaduk: I’m Ben Kaduk. I found out about SIPB at the activities midway, started hanging around the office, and found that it’s a cool place. I’ve put work into the Ask SIPB columns and iZephyr. I’ve thought about ways in which a door sensor might be implemented. arolfe: ecprice, what was the hardest question that got asked at last week’s meeting? ecprice: What do you mean by hard? arolfe: Which one is Ben going to least like answering in the second half of my question? ecprice: Name all the SIPB projects. jbarnold: We should have a service that lists all the… quentin: There is such a service! It’s a LaTeX file in /afs/sipb/admin/text/service-list.tex. kaduk: [lists 9 services] I did not study this question very hard, so that’s all I have at the moment. jbarnold: You have nine, go for ten. kaduk: Stapling! jbarnold: You get two points for that one. tabbott: ecprice, name some more. ecprice: [lists 10 more] rayhe: kaduk, back when I was a prospective, I worked on a door sensor; in fact I got all the parts. Then I was membered, left for the summer, and forgot about it. Now that we’re going to go on break, if we member you, are you going to forget about the door sensor project like some other unscrupulous SIPB members? kaduk: I’m bringing supplies to work on it over break. geofft: What server or service in the machine room uses the most and least bandwidth on the machine room network? kaduk: I believe scripts uses the most bandwidth. nelhage: No. ecprice: Newsgroups uses the most bandwidth. quentin: Except when linerva gets confused… geofft: The least is multics, since it’s in the machine room but uses no machine room bandwidth. andersk: Why do you want to be a SIPB member? [office]: NO!!!! [wanking about The Question] wdaher: ecprice, tell us a cute childhood story about yourself or price. ecprice: I don’t know. price: We had a boring childhood. arolfe: What SIPB project would you like to be involved in that you’re not currently. ecprice: It’s much more fun to start new projects than join existing ones. kaduk: I would be interested in joining scripts. jwalden: Expound, each of you, on why Unicode is awesome. tabbott: I don’t like this policy of indoctrination. They get to decide whether Unicode is awesome and defend that position. ecprice: Unicode is annoying, but it does have the advantage that it forces you to recognize the difference between characters and bytes. kaduk: [something similar] jhawk: A user walks into the office and complains that all the cluster printers have long queues? What do you tell them, and what do you do? ecprice: cview printers. jbarnold: One day, you’re tooling in the office, and jhawk brings in some giant piece of radio equipment, and starts building some sketchy doomsday device, when he starts electrocuting himself. What do you do? kaduk: Use a rope or a long stick to attempt to remove him from the shocking situation. mitchb: Having just run afoul of the SIPB no-violence-in-the-office policy, try again. ecprice: I would unplug the device. jbarnold: Use the breaker box behind the door. jbarnold: The nearest fire extinguisher is hidden behind our whiteboard that nobody knows about. mathmike: Isn’t it the institute policy to not fight fires? rayhe: SIPB members have a variety of computer skills. That’s why you’re welcome to the club. But we also appreciate people’s more eccentric skills. What are your eccentric skills? kaduk, I guess you’re a chemistry major. kaduk: That’s not eccentric, everyone should be a chemistry major! ecprice: I play ultimate frisbee. We should have an ultimate frisbee. jbarnold: If we had another one, it would be penultimate frisbee. nelhage: kaduk, could you say a word about the hats? kaduk: […] kaduk: Does the secretary need me to go back? andersk: I don’t really care, to be honest. kaduk: […] geofft: SIPB has many distinct forms of staplers available. If you could design your own types of stapler, what would it be? rayhe: SIPB should have a staple gun. jhawk: We do have a staple gun, rayhe. kaduk: But do we have a pneumatic staple gun? kenta: Do you have a special area of expertise? kaduk: Cooking. ecprice: Python. kenta: kaduk, something SIPB-related? rayhe: I think cooking might come up. jbarnold: I object to the idea that cooking is not SIPB-related. jhawk: Why don’t you have printer bits? And what do you feel about the competing stapler service in 38-3? kaduk: Stapler services are a good thing, and I don’t feel that we should consider it competition. ecprice: I think we _should_ consider it competition, and we should do a better job. ctl: Who was someone before someone was someone else? kaduk: [draws complicated graphs] [secretary gives up] yoz: What is the biggest organizational or bureaucratic problem facing SIPB? kaduk: There aren’t enough chairs. ecprice: I think that more of a problem is that meetings are dull. [secretary nods vigorously] ecprice: We don’t really know how to draw people in. asedeno: What is your preferred zephyr client and how would you change it? ecprice: Barnowl, and I would change it so it has a SQL backend that could be replicated among a number of different machines, and have separate frontends. kaduk: Barnowl, I would document the cool undocumented features. nelhage: I move that ctl ask the question. ctl: I object. jwalden: Each of you, ask the other a question that you know the answer to. ecprice: In python, how do you make stdout be unbuffered? […] [You open it with some flag.] kaduk: In LaTeX, how do you do left superscripts, as in ²³⁵U? […] [{}^{235}U.] andersk: I move that I ask the question. andersk: Why do you want to be a SIPB member? ecprice: So that when I hack in the office late at night, there isn’t that awkward moment when the last member in the office has to decide whether to ask me to leave. kaduk: What he said, and I like being in the office and the people in the office. <16-1-1, kaduk elected> <18-0-0, ecprice elected> MIT Computing Report: tabbott: It’s finals week. All the printers have long queues. SIPB Projects Report: arolfe: We’re working on working machine room machines into the racks. Since we have non-rackmountable machines, we need to get shelves for them. The advantage of this is that we can get rid of the shelving material and tables. We’d like to move a bunch of machines around when those people are gone, around Jan. 2–5. arolfe: Move to allocate up to $1000 to buy shelves for the machine room racks. jhawk: What’s your approximate price per shelf? arolfe: About $60 for the 2-post ones and $120 for the 4-post ones. quentin: rayhe, how are we doing on budget? rayhe: [operates loud vacuum cleaner] rayhe: I think we’ve spent a total of $800 since the last time I reported how much money we had, which was around $27000. <10-0-5, motion passes> quentin: broder, myself, and geofft (especially broder) have been working on packages for MacAthena. Not that crappy stuff in the New Media Center, but Athena based on OS X. We’re porting every reasonable Debathena package to OS X. tabbott: Except Kerberos IV. quentin: You can try it out on coleco-sidewinder. broder: I’ll try to keep csw up to date with our development. Right now it’s running Moira clients, Hesiod, and a fake version of add. quentin: And /mit automounter, tokens on login, etc. tabbott: If you’re working on a version of add that’s intended to replace the current attach infrastructure, it would be useful to talk to the athena10 list, ghudson, etc. quentin: We’ve been talking to Andrew Bordman. It sounds like IS&T wants to eventually make a MacAthena; what’s happening to Debathena will happen to MacAthena. wdaher: steve-dallas’s harddrive died, causing downtime to my rock-paper-scissors bot. quentin: And more importantly scripts-noc. wdaher: No, not more importantly. jbarnold: tibbetts’ response to putting RAID on steve-dallas was “nobody should think that machine is reliable”. arolfe: What’s up with the unused pile of 1U machines in the machine room? quentin: We’re waiting to buy hard drives for them, because every time we try to buy hard drives for them everyone goes “AAAH! SCSI HARD DRIVES ARE TOO EXPENSIVE!” quentin: IBM wants $200–$400 per drive. arolfe: This would be a convenient time to think about replacing old machine room machines with those. quentin: The argument was made that it would “only” cost about twice as much to buy new servers as it would to spend $500 in hard drives for each of these machines. jesstess: IAP is coming up. There are flyers on the table; you should put them up in your dorms. jesstess: Move to allocate $200 for SIPB IAP publicity; posters, etc. quentin: Have we looked at LSC and other cheap purveyors of posters? jesstess: In what way do you want LSC to be a cheap purveyor of posters? jbarnold: If you’re willing to put effort into publicity, fine, but past experience indicates that no matter how many posters we put up, people only find out about IAP classes through word of mouth and the online guide. jhawk: It’s dangerous to draw conclusions from how people say they found out about classes. The color calendars were useful. wdaher: I’d like to amend the motion to stipulate that the money should not be spent on some kind of combination flashlight-radio-keychain device. jesstess: That’s friendly. tabbott: If anyone wants some keychains, they’re in the box up there. andersk: We had a BarnFS design seminar today. quentin: IBM is selling 73 GB SCSI hard drives for $170. arolfe: Move to allocate $2000 for up to eight drives for the 1U servers. [lots of discussion] quentin: Move to allocate $2500 to enable the transition to rack-mountable hardware, to be spent at the discresion of the EC as contacted through the sipb-ec list as per discussion on the sipb-machine-room list, replacing the previous motions on this subject. <11-2-3, motion passes> Office Report: jhawk: I decided the office should have a bound copy of the beamer instructions. CopyTech wanted $.50 per page. We can get our own color laser printer more cheaply for $300–$1000. Expect a motion from me in the near future. rayhe: I’m thinking about replacing opus and zsr because they’re old and slow and zsr doesn’t work with the new monitor. tabbott: It’s just the terminals that doesn’t work. rayhe: Anyway, they’re aging machines; opus I think is a Pentium 4. I’ll probably be making allocations at the end of break. If you have suggestions, email me. Right now I’m thinking about Core 2 quads with lots of RAM and nice video cards that can actually drive the monitors. Other: rayhe: Cutting your own hair is hard to do. nelhage: MIT had its winter break today. price: For about an hour, this afternoon. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 21:02. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.