Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-03-24


The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price.

In attendance were 
	Voting members: price, mathmike, jhawk, kaduk, tabbott, mitchb,
			nelhage, andersk
	Associate members: asedeno
	Prospectives: 
	Guests: 

Officer Reports:

	nelhage: There'll be a hackathon next Saturday; I'll send mail
		tonight.
	tabbott: Can we have a hackathon for Debathena intro work the
		following Sunday?
	nelhage: Okay.
	jhawk: Is that during CPW?
	nelhage: No, it's the week before CPW.

	kaduk: I've affirmed, in accordance with Massachusetts General Law,
		that I will pass along to our membership information about
		the anti-hazing statutes.  Rather than do so by reading them
		aloud for the next 5-10 minutes, I'll do so in a textual
		format.
	tabbott: We didn't have to sign these rules during my term, due to
		ASA incompetence.

SIPB Projects Report:

	tabbott: There'll be a workshop to teach about Debian development
		on April 5th from 3pm onwards.  At 2pm, broder will talk
		about 'make' and such.  I'll send more mail tomorrow when I
		have a room booked.
	price: Has there been any HCS response to this?
	tabbott: I've received one reply; I'm unsure if others are too shy to
		reply to the mail.

	mitchb: The AFS maintainers are in the process of emptying out the
		server that used to hold that vast majority of our cell's
		data (reynelda.mit.edu), in preparation for various sundry
		maintenance tasks to occur later this week, and we think
		that the cell will be better distributed and a bit faster
		as a result of some of this work.

	nelhage: I've been playing with the Conkeror web browser.  It's an
		emacs-like interface to Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine.
		I've installed it, and it should work on Debathena, but not
		Linux Athena yet, due to library issues.  I may work on that
		soon.

	nelhage: A new build of barnowl for all 3 platforms is now available,
		and it shouldn't eat up all of your CPU.  Hopefully, the
		ridiculous number or barnowls at the top of linerva's top
		display will decrease as a result.

	price: We've been working on an autoinstaller for Trac on scripts.
		Trac is very useful as a ticket-tracking system.  If you're
		reading this on the sipb-minutes list, then by the time you
		see this, it'll be working!
	nelhage: [to mitchb] Quick - send the minutes out now!
	mitchb: How close is it to being done?
	price: Very.

	tabbott: I attempted to build a SAGE package, and our chroot
		environment ran out of space... apparently there's a lot
		of free math software.

	tabbott: On Debathena machines, if you don't access anything via the
		automounter, and you try to shutdown the machine, it'll no
		longer hang due to the AFS shutdown happening before the
		automounter shutdown.

Office Report:

	jhawk: meadow has started making a high-pitched squeaky sound.
		Also, in its server transition [from husqvarna to io], it
		seems to have lost features like -Ztabloid.

Other:

	jhawk: Facilities has replaced a humidifier in the machine room air
		conditioner that recently leaked.  As of yet, I haven't
		gotten an explanation of why they think that's sufficient to
		solve the problem, but I'm pursuing it.

	nelhage: I discovered afuse, and used it to create an /ssh
		automounting filesystem on my machine.
	tabbott: If we installed it on linerva, would it do the right thing
		with multiple users?
	nelhage: No.
	tabbott: That's what I thought.

	asedeno: I made my first contribution to ncurses.  It can now render
		multibyte characters with color when built with extended color
		support.

Other Other:

	jhawk: Last night, SIPB was my "command center" for trying to handle
		the situation of the 77 Mass. Ave. crossing light outage.  I
		was disappointed with the Campus Police's [lack of] response,
		and Facilities's unwillingness to deploy emergency lighting.
	kaduk: It was out of service for at least 17 hours.
	nelhage: Are there plans to set up Nagios monitoring of it?
	jhawk: No.  But maybe we could put a webcam on the roof?

	nelhage: I now have iCal support for sipb-door stuff, but Google
		Calendar hates me.

The meeting was adjourned at 19:42.


	Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.