Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-09-29 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: jesstess, quentin, nelhage, mitchb, price, broder, neboat, jhawk, kaduk Associate members: asedeno, jbarnold, tabbott Prospectives: biyeun, jhamrick, xavid, y_z, pweaver Guests: Officer Reports: kaduk: It's been a while since this has been mentioned, so... SIPB is an MIT group, so we don't pay sales tax. We have tax-exempt form to wave at people, though it's harder to buy things over the internet. It's also more expeditious to get reimbursed if you have an itemized receipt. SIPB Projects Report: broder: I'd like to request a project report from the SQL team? quentin: Our RAM was installed ~4 days ago, but there's not enough data to report on yet. In a week, hopefully. price: XVM did a lot of work yesterday. We hopefully will have a production cluster soon. y_z: We're trying to round up people to give Cluedumps talks. One thing we'd like to do is allocate money for food. price: The allocation has been $50/cluedump in the past. You'll spend less most weeks, but if you have a large audience, it's nice for it to be available. Do you want to move to make that allocation? y_z: Yes. quentin: I second. price: When is the first Cluedump? y_z: This coming Tuesday (8 days from now), by marc. jesstess: On Athena? y_z: Yes. price: If you have Cluedump ideas or things you want to see, or want to give a talk about, tell y_z (or e-mail cluedumps). kaduk: There was not an AskSIPB column submitted to The Tech this week. nelhage: I started putting together a Linerva test machine running Lenny. It seems like this shouldn't be as annoying as the Etch transition was. price: Speaking of distributions, XVM is probably going to be on Hardy because it has a Xen kernel, and other distributions don't. quentin: scripts is trying to get rid of our make-every-file-executable hack, so start to make sure your CGI scripts have the execute bit set. We'll be doing outreach to prepare our users. Office Report: price: There's a computer on Tokyo-laptop labelled "for quentin" that's been there for a couple of days. quentin: I'll deal with it soon. It's been raining. jhawk: There's a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard. price: Yes. Most of these are office supplies: mechanical pencils, ethernet cables, tissues, band-aids, cold packs, CD-Rs, dry erase markers, Tylenol. Also, someone wants OmniGraffle. Does anyone know who asked for that? quentin: I'd recommend it, but didn't write it down; it's like Visio for Mac and doesn't suck. kaduk: What's the use case for the mechanical pencils? jhawk/jesstess/price: Giving them away to users; they're cheap. price: Okay, so as far as the office supplies, if someone wants to buy them... kaduk: ME! I WANT TO BUY THEM! mitchb: I've never seen anyone so excited about anything at a SIPB meeting. quentin: sipbmp3 now supports more than just mp3s and oggs. If you spool a text file, it's assumed to contain URLs, and if the files at those URLs appear to be playlists, it'll work with those, too. xvolume and ttyvolume also work again. kaduk: What happens if you throw /bin/ls at it? quentin: It'll probably fail immediately and zephyr about it. kaduk: The floor has been getting pretty dirty. Has anyone seen CAC vacuuming in here? price: Yeah, last week. jhawk: Sometimes they do it and then forget for a while. jbarnold: Do we have the Lyons commentary on UNIX here? [no] jbarnold: I'd recommend having one. It's the canonical annotated set of UNIX code that's been used to teach things like 6.828 before they started using xv6. kaduk: I may be in a position to donate one, soon ... Other: quentin: People have had nothing but trouble with the new wireless networks in W20, NW35, etc. jhawk: These new devices appear to be 6-headed dragons, are on 18.111 instead of 18.187, and seem not to have DNS. quentin: The problems being seen are primarily being randomly unassociated and experiencing OSX kernel panics due to the network stack. jhawk: Has this been reported? broder: Yes, I have a ticket that's being escalated by jdreed and peloquin. Other Other: quentin: The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is this Thursday at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. We should all go. On Saturday, the Ig Informal Lectures are in 10-250. price: If you haven't been reading the news, this is an exciting week to read the news. jhawk: If you haven't been reading the news, you should maybe continue not reading the news. tabbott: Unless you have money in the stock market. jhawk: Then you should really not read the news. The meeting was adjourned at 19:44. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.