Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2009-01-05 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by kaduk. In attendance were Voting members: kaduk, broder, quentin, mitchb, jhawk Associate members: tilia | belmonte Prospectives: biyeun, LIST:s4m (Ed: I refuse to type the address on that list) | sjlevine Guests: Officer Reports: kaduk: I was lame last month and sat on a bunch of RFPs. They've now been submitted. It usually takes a couple weeks for the checks to appear. SIPB Projects Report: mitchb: fawkes reports that the ruby-lang locker has been updated with ruby versions 1.8.7p72 (the current stable) and 1.9.1 release candidate 1. The binaries for 1.9.1 are suffixed with 1.9 (ruby1.9, irb1.9, ri1.9, etc.). If you are on linerva, add -f because there is a 1.8.5 "ruby" in /usr/bin. If you don't know ruby, but would like to learn come on Wed (1-115, 3pm-6pm). broder: MacAthena finally figured out what was going on with com_err, so now if you use blanche, you'll get real error messages! kaduk: So, this means that you can tell the rest of us how com_err works, right? [much laughter] quentin: Over the past several weeks, several SIPB projects relying on AFS to get group information discovered that pts calls were unencrypted. The consequences are that we believe it was possible to spoof replies from the protection database server. This affected scripts, XVM, and sipb-afs. All these services were quietly patched to use tokens to encrypt the queries. AFS's Rx layer already supported encryption, so this was made relatively easy and only required client-side changes in AFS. quentin: scripts patched an unrelated vulnerability found while fixing the previously mentioned one. For the past several years, it was actually possible to make an ioctl call to retrieve daemon.scripts's tokens into userspace. Office Report: jhawk: I've declared our analog clock to be broken. It turns out that the minute and second hands do not always move properly in phase with each other. mitchb: I win. kaduk: This statement [jhawk's] is in dispute. jhawk: I move to allocate $25 for a new clock. quentin: I second, and move to white ballot. broder: Can I object to the white ballot? kaduk: Yes, you can. <5-0-1 - $25 to jhawk for a new analog clock> mitchb: To clarify the "I win" comment, this discrepancy has caused the clock to read 7:30:00 when it was actually 7:29:00, and yet properly read 7:31:30 when it was actually 7:31:30, and was hence the reason the meeting I ran two weeks ago began a minute early, and that jhawk did not believe that I had properly read the clock despite my protestations. mitchb: fawkes would like us to consider buying these three books: (1) "The Debian System" http://nostarch.com/debian.htm (2) "The Ruby Programming Language" http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596516178/index.html (3) "Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide" http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9 He comments that (1) will go well with broder's and price's Debian packaging class, and is $29.67 from Amazon. (2) he says is the Kernighan & Ritchie of Ruby and would be a good thing for the office if anyone is going to use Ruby much; it is $26.39 from Amazon. It's already available on Safari, but would be nice to have a dead tree copy. (3) is supposedly the Camel Book of Ruby, and is a strange case. It is currently a Beta PDF that gets updated as the author submits changes. We also supposedly already have the 2nd edition of it (this purchase would be the edition dated March 2009). He proposes that we allocate $59.95 to have the PDF now and the dead tree copy when it prints. However, he realizes that this may be more contentious than the other two books. LIST:s4m: I've heard the Pragmatic Programmer's Guide series is good. broder: I'll point out that "The Debian System" is really more geared towards users than developers. I'm not sure if fawkes realizes this. mitchb: It seems like the type of thing we ought to have even so for ~$30. kaduk: So, are you making a motion? mitchb: Sure. Do people want me to split them up or lump them together? broder: Let's just put them together. mitchb: Okay. Let's round the costs up to $30, $30, and $60. So, I move to allocate $120 for fawkes to obtain dead tree copies of "The Debian System" and "The Ruby Programming Language" and the Beta PDF and eventually the dead tree copy of "Programming Ruby 1.9". broder: White ballot? quentin: kaduk, how's our budget? mitchb: Great, because geofft hasn't bought his 8 books from half a year ago! kaduk: I believe our budget can support this purchase. tilia: What is our budget? kaduk: Nominally, $19,800, but you need to take out Athena fees, etc. broder: I feel like we haven't really allocated money for anything other than books this term. kaduk: Okay, so shall we vote on this? mitchb: I didn't hear any objections to broder's white ballot. kaduk: Alright, any objections to a white ballot? Other: broder: IAP is sooner than you think. tilia: I've always wanted to hear someone say "IAP is now" like Charlton Heston saying "Soylent green is people!" LIST:s4m: [obliges] quentin: I recently ordered something from GovConnection and just today got my fourth instance of this item. I wonder when they'll stop sending me more of them. jhawk: It seems to take the CAO three years to follow up when you don't cash checks. kaduk: I wonder if it takes them that long to follow up on checks on the order of $13,000. mitchb: Was that how much the jbarnold check was? kaduk: That was the incident I was thinking of. Other Other: '() The meeting was adjourned at 19:44. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.