Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2009-05-04 The meeting was called to order at 19:30: by nelhage. In attendance were Voting members: broder, ezyang, fawkes, jesstess, jhamrick, kaduk, nelhage, quentin, xavid, ctl | iannucci Associate members: asedeno, belmonte, mitchb | jhawk Prospectives: s4m | pbaranay, adehnert Guests: Officer Reports: kaduk: SPEND MONEY! nelhage: What's the latest figure on how much? kaduk: Rough estimate is like $8000. ezyang: Let's buy memory! broder: Let's wait until next week. nelhage: The scripts and linerva teams are putting together proposals that we'll send mail about soon and make allocations at probably either the next meeting, or I suppose if it's something *really* big perhaps the next meeting so that we can have a full week of email discussion. price: No. We should send mail like tonight or tomorrow. nelhage: Scripts and linerva RAM will certainly happen at next meeting, but we might postpone things like the Evan and Mitch machine room warm spare idea. mitchb: No, it's like a cryogenic, in-stasis spare; it's not warm. broder: It's definitely not warm; it is, at best, cold. mitchb: It's a machine that doesn't know which service it needs to be tomorrow. price: It's a "stem cell spare." nelhage: ... Yeaaaa mitchb: Unless that's been outlawed by OIS. broder: Do I have a report? I feel like I have something. Does anyone know what it is? nelhage: There will be an election at next week's meeting to elect a new SIPB chairman to replace me since I am graduating and will no longer be a student. SIPB Projects Report: quentin: Scripts recently had a user who needed to have *real* certificates for their website, that is expensive, third-party ones and not MIT certificates. So we would like to revive our allocation from last year to buy certificates for scripts and change the amount to the current price. So, if we get certificates for 5 years for *.scripts and scripts, that will be $1150. nelhage: For comparison, what do shorter time periods look like? quentin: It's not quite clear. So Like 1/5 plus 50% or so. So I move to make an allocation, replacing the allocation from a year ago, for certificates in the amount of $1150. broder: Second and white ballot? nelhage: I don't think we should white ballot an allocation for this amount, but we passed the same allocation last year. quentin: It was $900 when we allocated last year. nelhage: We passed approximately the same allocation last year and they failed to follow through on it, but this time they assure me that they've actually got a specific and geofft is waiting to push the button. s4m: If they're going to collect credit card info, then that [getting a better certificate] makes sense. quentin: So this particular case was some one who was doing registration for an athletics event that was being hosted by MIT and they were linking to a credit card processing site and people were getting very annoyed at getting repelled. broder: Because people who use scripts are not necessarily MIT students, so people who are using scripts they may be developing to people. nelhage: In general, it's nice if you are running a website that you want to use as a front page or a contact point or whatever to have a real certificate that non-MIT people or MIT people who simply haven't installed the CA will automatically get from a respectable signatory. s4m: Well, the going to collect credit card information requirement is good. nelhage: Anyways, any more discussion on the motion? xavid: What's the use case for the scripts.mit.edu certificate if the tilde style names [scripts.mit.edu/~foo] are deprecated? quentin: They aren't deprecated yet. And that's the cheap part, like $200. jhawk: Could someone restate the motion please? broder: quentin would like to allocate $1150 for 5-year certificates for scripts and *.scripts, replacing the allocation we never spent. kaduk: I would just like to point that I hear rumors of multiple possible motions that could be spending significant amounts of money, and it might be worth considering trying to get something resembling a proposal or a rough number for all of these, so we can distribute the remaining funds in SIPB's account. I feel slightly uneasy about making this sort of thing be "first come, first served," but not incredibly so, because, as we've seen, we do not always follow through on our allocations. quentin: I would suggest that this is something we really would like and something the board has already approved in the past. nelhage: It doesn't really fall under the "new things that it would be nice to have" category. mitchb: And it's pretty orthogonal to all the hardware things that are normal. jhawk: Abstaining? nelhage: I'm not calling for abstentions. As a point of trivia, Robert's Rules explicitly advises the chair not to call for abstentions as its a meaningless gesture as not raising your hand at all is functionally equivalent to raising your hand for abstentions. jhawk: We, of course, do not follow Robert's Rules. nelhage: I am aware. jhawk: Tradition has been to call for abstentions. This is worth noting. nelhage: I'm aware. I've decided that's silly. broder: This weekend, XVM upgraded to Xen 3.3, finally, just in time for Xen 3.4 to come out. It's on RCs at this point so it should be out in the next month or so. Granted, it will probably be five or six months before it is in a packaged form where we can use it, but that is beside the point. What is relevant is that we can now do things like migrate 32-bit Paravirtualized Xen machines which we couldn't do before. We have reinstated our 32-bit autoinstallers which we disabled when we discovered we couldn't migrate. We also, thanks to Xen 3.3 support for paravirt_ops-based kernels, now support autoinstallers for Intrepid and Jaunty. We are going to be writing up some documentation in the near future about how you can upgrade your Hardy VM to Intrepid or Jaunty should you so desire. mitchb: This weekend, Scripts finally successfully deployed its first virtualized server. So there are now 3 currently running scripts servers in the pool. The virtualized one is named bees-knees. We plan to have more virtualized servers in the future. We have received zero support tickets for stuff we forgot to install on it. nelhage: This weekend the barnowl developers tracked down a pair of pretty disgusting memory leaks. Basically barnowl was leaking several times the space of a message every time it formatted a message for display. This is now fixed and a release has been pushed to the locker so barnowl should now be something less of a ridiculous memory hog. asedeno: Have you stress-tested it? nelhage: I have not attempted to fill barnowl with messages in ridiculous numbers. ezyang: I'm working on migrating autoinstallers from [Scripts'] current perl and normal patch system system to a git-based system. If you are interested in working on this project, contact me or xavid. pbaranay: Publicity, it's my new project! I would like to ask the ASA to give us bulletin board space in the Infinite. If no one else is willing to help with this, I will make a poster, if we get space, and put it there. When other people make posters I will put them there in that space. nelhage: I'm curious what you envision the typical use of this space being. pbaranay: Basically a big sign saying SIPB, a list of our services, talking about the sipb@ list, and a box for events such as Cluedumps, SIPB IAP, and so on. I mean I understand that we have a nice space right here [outside the office], but the Infinite also gets a *lot* of foot traffic and is a nice point of visibility, so I think it'd be helpful. jhawk: What do you believe our responsibilities to be vis-a-vis this bulletin board? pbaranay: Our responsibilities specifically? jhawk: Yes, I mean the ASA has some rules... pbaranay: Keep it maintained, report vandalism, don't... it's very simple. jhawk: "Keep it maintained" always struck me as not simple. Anyway, so you are volunteering to keep it maintained for the duration of the allocation, which is 24 months. pbaranay: Well, no, this isn't relevant to SIPB, the allocation is for a year, this would be for fall '09. jhawk: The ASA doesn't allocate boards on a yearly basis. Perhaps they intend to, but they haven't in the past. pbaranay: This is irrelevant, I'm on the ASA board and we didn't reallocate in the fall last year, we were supposed to and... jhawk: It's certainly relevant... pbaranay: Not relevant to SIPB specifically. broder: Offline, people. nelhage: The point is that you are volunteering to maintain the board space as long as the ASA has allocated it to us. pbaranay: Correct. nelhage: Okay. Well, I think as long as someone is planning to keep it maintained and give us some publicity presence in the Infinite, I'm fine with that. I definitely would share some concerns of our not maintaining the board space consistently. jhawk: I just want to make sure Paul knows what he's getting into. I asked him hard questions and he's provided answers. nelhage: Anybody else have comments on getting a board in the Infinite? pbaranay: Okay then, I'll do it. quentin: geofft is trying to organize a series of classes over the summer. I gather he has volunteered to organize it. So if you would like to teach something, talk to him about it. broder: So what you are saying is "Summer is sooner than you think!" quentin: In fact it is. And that's very scary at this point in the term. nelhage: On that note, both IAP and Cluedumps are also both sooner than you think. We are still looking for people to help take charge of organizing either of those events. Cluedumps is a series of roughly weekly, traditionally they've been after the meetings, but we've moved them around a little depending on the availability of people running them and schedule, weekly talks by SIPB members given to the SIPB community about some technical topics intended either for novices, new people who are new to MIT or new to programming and computing, or intended for the SIPB community and going more in-depth on some technical topic. If some one is interested in coordinating those (basically, finding speakers, scheduling them, sending out publicity, and getting snacks for them), talk to me. And ditto for our IAP classes. We traditionally offer a whole bunch of IAP classes over the month of IAP. If you are interested in finding out what managing details xavid and jesstess did last year, they'll tell you what it entails. Basically it is signing us up with the catalogue, a lot of recruiting, and maintaining our website. If either of those sound interesting, you can talk to me and we'll make that happen again. Office Report: jhamrick: I am going to be finally working on reorganizing drawers. I will move people out of their drawers who don't use their drawers. price: So this means people who want drawers that don't have them should email you? jhamrick: Yes. quentin: The MIT Museum wants MAX. They apparently have Maxine, which is the last DECstation used as an Athena workstation and they apparently want MAX to go alongside it. jhawk: Maxine is a model name, for the record. nelhage: I'll be delivering about half a dozen of our pile of volumes to the MIT archives. That is the theses that we have that they don't already have hard copies of. I have contacted the Computer History Museum about the rest of it and have not yet heard back. Since I will probably stop being chair before we get rid of [the rest of the stuff in the monolith], I still intend to continue with those, hopefully in a timely fashion. quentin: I notice how you inserted "hopefully." Other: quentin: Classes are almost over. Friday is the last day any assignment can be due if your class has a final. Other Other: kaduk: I'm going to start collecting some data for my theoretical studies of dilithium. belmonte: What? jhamrick: It was cold today which is sad because I thought it was supposed to be warm. jesstess: It really wasn't. broder: Yea, I disagree. jhamrick: I think it was cold. s4m: Swine flu is at level 5 but it's still not a pandemic yet. broder: But Harvard got out of classes... and we get out of our "Spring Break." The meeting was adjourned at 19:48:45. Minutes taken and submitted by fawkes.