Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-05-12 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: jhawk, jesstess, quentin, tabbott, mathmike, jwalden, andersk, mitchb, price, broder, kaduk, nelhage, geofft Associate members: asedeno Prospectives: dnawi, njess, neboat, ccpost, y_z Guests: alya, kyoki Officer Reports: price: Welcome to the SIPB meeting, and could someone turn off the music? price: I move to nominate neboat for membership. <14-0-0 neboat is nominated> price: I move to nominate njess for membership. <13-0-1 njess is nominated> kaduk: It was noticed earlier today that we couldn't find cans of compressed air, and I've said that I would do this before, so I've now ordered 4 bottles of compressed air. SIPB Projects Report: njess: price and I hacked a bunch this weekend and figured out whose lockers we can't autoupdate WordPress in due to their tweaking, and I'll be sending them mail with details soon. tabbott: debuild seems to be having increasingly frequent problems with its disk. I move to allocate $250 for new disks for debuild. nelhage: What type of disks? tabbott: Probably two 500GB disks. neboat: There's been progress with the scripts to set up disks for XVM paravirtualized machines. It seems to work, but there's still some stuff to tweak. broder: Also with XVM, there's the remote control server. I've created the remctl locker containing binaries for all platforms I have access to. If you find others, e-mail me or xvm. nelhage: barnowl merged the unicode branch to the trunk, so the version on Athena should now be aware of how to print wide characters. I also intend to get it into real Debian, hopefully in the next couple of weeks, but maybe later in the summer. geofft: jbarnold had the idea that since there's an itpartners conference in two weeks and I should be there, it might be reasonable for SIPB to fly me in. jhawk: I think we have a budget crunch. kaduk: I don't have particularly good reason to oppose this motion on the grounds of insufficient funds. jhawk: I'm questioning whether if we have $500 more, this is what we should spend it on. mitchb: I'll note that anything involving travel adds in a bunch of other paperwork, so this definitely won't go unnoticed, if we're concerned about that. price: The background is that itpartners has asked the Scripts Team to come describe how scripts can be used by their members since there's significant interest among them. broder: It has come up that some people in IS&T are unhappy with how much scripts is being used by departments, and since we're in shaky water already, I wonder if this would cause any problems. price: jbarnold and I have continued that conversation and ascertained that the problem does not really have to do with scripts, and is specifically related to the virtualization service, so this should not be a problem. tabbott: We've found this sort of presentation to be beneficial in the past. geofft: I move to allocate up to $400 for plane tickets to fly geofft to campus for a May 29 presentation at the IT-Partners conference about scripts.mit.edu. broder: I'd like to amend that this is contingent on further discussion within the scripts team. geofft: That's friendly. jhawk: What fraction of our remaining pseudobudget would this be? [some discussion] kaduk: About $3k remains. jhawk: I think this is not so important that we should do it, and that perhaps someone else who will be around should give the presentation. It's a nice idea, but maybe not $300-$400 nice. price: scripts is one of the most widely used services, and important to our image. tabbott: I agree that this is important, but also that someone other than Geoff would be able to give the talk, perhaps by preparing in advance and having Geoff available. jhawk: The scripts team has not made any effort to my satisfaction to convince the Board that this is important. I could see why it might be. price: geofft, do you wish to move forward with the motion? geofft: I'd like to make clear to the office that the money won't be used until further discussion happens and unless it's determined that a useful possible alternative doesn't exist. But yes, I'd like to move forward with the allocation so that the possibility is available. kaduk: I'd like to reinforce some of what jhawk is saying, and point out that it seems like the scripts team hasn't considered its options carefully. I agree that scripts is important, but feel that they should work within their team before coming to the Board for help (which the Board should provide if it's needed). tabbott: It sounds like what's happened is that the scripts team hasn't had enough internal discussion, but that the Board would approve the allocation if it were needed. So, I think we should approve the allocation but make it clear to them that in the future they need to coordinate in advance. <7-3-5 - $400 to geofft for airfare for the IT-Partners conference, contingent on internal scripts discussion> Office Report: jhawk: The replacement for the monitor formerly from zsr arrived and seemed to exhibit the same problem, and then shortly thereafter, the power supply in cutter-john (to which it is now connected) failed. I've pursued the PSU issue with Dell, and they're coming tomorrow. I've not yet pursued the monitor issue again, and am hoping the issue won't come back, but that's probably foolish. Comments? quentin: I think it'd be wise to mention the monitor issue to the technician. jhawk: There was recent use of telecomm tools from the telecomm drawer, including an inductive sniffer and a rotary buttset. [laughter] mitchb: I wonder if they're laughing at the fact that the stuff was used, or the name of the tool. price: Some radical stuff happened to laptop land. geofft: I moved all the power bricks below the table and tried to thread the ends that get plugged into laptops above the table. price: This has the excellent property that laptop land is clear, or mostly clear, for the first time in a long while. kaduk: I think it'd be fairly easy to construct an aluminum tray of some sort spanning the short dimension of the desk to serve as a holder for the bricks. As it is now, this will just lead to the tangled mess being under the table and kickable. price: Also, presently the wires come up through the crack between the tables, where they can fall back down. It'd be great if we had a solution to keep them from falling. geofft: We got e-mail from CAC saying that they'll be washing the windows soon. I also notice that there's a passive cellphone repeater on the window that supposedly makes cellphone coverage suck less... is this going to be a problem? jhawk: No, that shouldn't be affected by the washing. price: This is happening on May 19. We should move some of the junk that's on the radiator away so that they don't see big piles of junk waiting to get wet and punt. price: It's great that the office has been used a lot in the past couple of weeks, but there seems to be "junk" accumulating. There's a Trader Joe's bag back here with stuff like shower gel, canned peaches, etc. There's also the fax machine, which has something that seems to be hodge-podge on top of it. The food supply drawer isn't closed, either. mitchb: Actually, I think the reason the food drawer isn't closed is that stuff has fallen out the back of the drawer and is blocking it. I've tried reaching into the back and have removed some stuff, but couldn't get all of it. Also, I don't think I can get the whole drawer out because there's not enough room in front of it. So, basically, I think we need to member someone really small who can climb all the way inside to get the stuff out... that seems like a reasonable prospective project, right? jhawk: Please remember to plug the analog phone back in if you unplug it. Also, it seems that CAC's phones were converted to VoIP today, so we may be up against the deadline. quentin: Did you talk with CAC about it? mitchb: "Couldn't get through." [...] jhawk: I was just trying to sound very doomful. tabbott: After the meeting... after the meeting... after the meeting... price: As anyone who read sipb-office today knows, we have a lot of office heads and they're all in use right now. A couple of them are getting quite old. opus is a 1GHz Pentium III, and zsr is a 2GHz Pentium 4. In the budget we sent to ois-finance (and they were happy with), we were allotted $1500 for a new office head. I spec'd out a Dell Optiplex 755 last night (details in e-mail). It's pretty quiet. We could get quad-core 4GB of RAM, 2 disks, for $1300. quentin: Is that including the video card? price: Yes, and I checked that it's supported in Linux. So, it'd be a fine, powerful new office head. There are a few things we can change. It comes with a 19" monitor. We could upgrade it, but not to mega-man's size. I did a census of the monitors in the office. It would be smaller than four of our monitors and larger than eight if we got a 22" monitor. The other variation we could make is to make the graphics card a fancy powerful one for about $100. The advantage of this is that if we get a mega-man-sized monitor in the future, an ordinary graphics card wouldn't be able to drive it, but this one would. The disadvantage is that the nice card supposedly makes the machine loud. mitchb: If we were to get the card separately later, not as part of the package, how would its cost compare with the $100 upgrade? price: It's about the same. mitchb: Okay, so then if we can get the card at the same time we get a monitor later without detriment to a price deal, and we might have more options for cards then, I'd recommend against getting it now. quentin: I have a concern that might affect the price: it sounds like opus is the slowest machine in the office, and it has the scanner attached to it. What type of interface does that need? [SCSI, and some discussion about whether we could move the card or would need to get a new one] mitchb: I think it would be a bad idea, if we replace opus, to leave the scanner on the new machine, since it's likely to be perpetually in use; the scanner should be on a less nice machine. price: I move to allocate $1500 for a new office head along the lines of the specs e-mailed out last night. tabbott: Another possibility is that we could use that money to buy another monitor and use our current heads. I believe the monitors are more useful. price: I think that would less closely resemble what we told OIS we were going to do. tabbott: I think they more wanted to know how much and what sorts of things we were thinking about. broder: I disagree [with tabbott] and find the 30" monitor sort of uncomfortable and awkward. mitchb: I sort of feel like I should be sharing the terminal with someone else because I can't fill up all the space. jwalden: I think we'd get more utility out of another office head than we would out of a new monitor. tabbott: People wouldn't end up sitting at the opus position; it's an awkward spot. price: It's occupied at almost every meeting, usually by mitchb. mitchb: It's not my preferred head, but it does have the nice property that if you want to be in the office, but explicitly would rather not be in one of the hotseats because you have homework to do or something and don't want to be the first one walkins come to, it's in a good position to meet that desire. <11-1-2 - $1500 to price for a new office head per e-mailed specs> Other: tabbott: Various SIPB members have reported bugs in the LaTeX thesis templates recently. price: These templates came from SIPB twenty years ago. nelhage: Incoming freshmen have started getting Athena accounts, and there are rumors that some have begun to appear on zephyr. Greg and I will be contacting people from the midway to suggest that if they're coming to MIT and have accounts, there are a number of cool SIPB services they may want to play with. broder: Relatedly, adding people to a list in response to an e-mail from them counts as a lock on replying to that e-mail. tabbott: Wait, are we talking about lists like sipb-office? mitchb: We probably shouldn't be adding people to sipb-office and similar lists without actually prospectivizing them. broder: Just the midway list, basically. mathmike: New Athena accounts will get a .generation file with the number "1". price: This will enable duplex printing by default. dnawi: Good luck on finals. There are now energy drinks and energy bars. They cost 4 dots. Hopefully they'll be enjoyable. Also, prices haven't changed for 5 years, so I'm going to change the price of snacks from 45 cents to 60 cents. I'll also be consolidating some more accounts into the hall of fame. broder: Exams are sooner than you think... or probably want them to be. quentin: Ternus has organized a special ham radio exam session this Wednesday at 7:30 in 1-246. mitchb: Um... saying that he organized it is not really... um... accurate. quentin: Well, then he caused it to be organized. mitchb: Uh. Okay, go on. [mitchb having done half of the organization at ternus's request] quentin: This is instead of, well, in addition to their usual exam session in the middle of finals week. So, if you're interested in getting your license, you should show up. geofft: We seem to be getting hardware issues resolved by calling Dell and such, so why are we paying Athena fees? jhawk: Well, we're not paying Athena fees on the new monitor. But it's true that had I thought harder about the PSU, I might have just called hotline. Other Other: geofft: There's a new Apple store opening in Boston on Thursday. The meeting was adjourned at 20:30. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.