Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2009-05-18 The meeting was called to order at 19:29:59 by ezyang. In attendance were Voting members: broder, ezyang, fawkes, geofft, iannucci, jesstess, jhamrick, kaduk, nelhage, price, quentin, xavid Associate members: asedeno, belmonte, mitchb, jhawk Prospectives: pbaranay, pweaver, rram, tvald Guests: '() Officer Reports: ezyang: I was elected chair last SIPB meeting; I will be running this meeting and future meetings. I don't have much else to say. kaduk: Since the end of the fiscal year is coming up, I assume people want a report on the financial status of the board. If we do not use the $1000 allocation for the reunion, we have $5700, if we do, then $4700. jhawk: When is the last date upon which we can easily spend money? kaduk: Last fiscal year, it was June 19. jhawk: I thought it was June 1. [argument about this] kaduk: Last fiscal year, it was June 19. SIPB Projects Report: jhamrick: Dodona version 0.1 is finished. She is running on -c dodona. You can ask her questions, but don't be surprised if you break her. quentin: What is her favorite question? jhamrick: "Tell me about emacs." mitchb: That's not actually a question. geofft: The Debathena archive signing key is now posted on the glass wall on the inside of the machine room, if you, for some reason, want to verify it this way. If, however, someone manages to get into the machine room, they can probably do things to the distribution server. Barnowl supports sending to . You should look for messages there. Scripts has an allocation proposal. We want $900 for hardware upgrades. This is mostly for RAM. There was mail about this earlier. We will be getting vinegar-pot from the linerva maintainers. We will be moving RAM around and purchasing enough to end up with 8GB in each of 4 servers. Additionally, we want there to be 4GB in each SQL server; this requires some shuffling and purchasing of 4 additional 2GB sticks. In total RAM will cost $707.96. Additionally we would like to purchase two new drives for not-forward. They will cost $66 each, bringing the total to $840, so we would like to allocate $900. broder: I am not going to stand in the way, but I am upset with the fact it was not explained earlier. broder: Debathena deployed the new version of debathena-workstation. It has an autoupdater and all the other things you would expect from a cluster machine. It is now an option in the installer. mitchb: charon is running out of disk. It was pointed out to us by quentin, a couple weeks ago, that SIPB has a box of extra disks for any projects that need them. The box said there were two 160GB IDE disks, but one ended up being eSATA. So we would like to buy a cheap disk. Quentin suggested that we buy two disks so that there is still a spare around. So, I would like to allocate $120 for two 160GB disks, one for charon and one for the machine room. jhawk: I object to the white ballot, not necessarily based on the content of the allocation, but on grounds that there was not enough notice before it was made. pbaranay: I have a publicity update. The ASA will be allocating bulletin boards tomorrow, so we will know soon if we are getting one. [snickering] broder: So what you are saying is that you are allocating them tomorrow? pbaranay: [defensively] There is a committee! pbaranay: The First Year Summer Mailing application form is up and online at: https://asa.scripts.mit.edu:444/applications/fysm/apply.py. kaduk has volunteered to help me with this. It will require some graphic design work. It's basically to put together some information to be distributed to freshmen about what SIPB is, what we do, etc. If you are interested in helping, let me know. I am in touch with Shuling Benedict at National Sportwear (shuling@nationalsportswear.com) from whom we last ordered shirts. In 2005, we ordered around 80 T-shirts for $473.35. It is unclear at this time whether pricing has changed. We allocated $500 then and I would like to make the same allocation. price: For this fiscal year or next? pbaranay: This year. [discussion about ordering vs delivery this fiscal year] kaduk: For clarification, these are the same style? pbaranay: Yes. Same exact design as before. As I said in my email, I'd like to get a variety of colors, women's cut, etc. depending on availability and pricing. quentin: How long do you expect the shirts to last? pbaranay: They lasted 4 years last time, so I would expect a similar term. mitchb: They might last less long if we recruit better. quentin: I think this is a problem we are willing to have. geofft: You guys like T-shirts more than charon more than scripts? [someone]: It's all based on uptime! [Ed note: the uptime discussions below happened later in the meeting, but are placed here for the sake of clarity] mitchb: There was the joking about uptime earlier, but on that subject, scripts is achieving new milestones all the time. Gone are the days of random unexplained crashes every few hours. b-m uptime will be 2 weeks tomorrow, and o-f has been up over 19 days. [applause] quentin: syn has been up for 206 days. mitchb: But it doesn't do anything! It just tell us scripts is down when it isn't! nelhage: On Wednesday or Thursday, linerva ran into a known OpenAFS issue which triggered a bug which caused many AFS-dependent processes to hang. This caused several SVN repositories to become locked such that they would not unlock as long as linerva was up. iannucci: I would like to point out that this was immediately before the 6.005 final project was due, the instructions of which specifically instructed students to use linerva to commit their projects to subversion. nelhage: Yes, I am of the understanding that we were responsible for a general extension in that class. [applause] nelhage: We rebooted on short notice for obvious reasons. The kernel has been patched so that we should not run into this issue again. price: This was applied using Ksplice? nelhage: Of course. broder: Nope, we hand-compile our kernels in these parts. quentin: LAMP has a new TV encoder. You might notice this as LAMP now being viewable in Next House, as it apparently wasn't recently. Additionally signal strength has increased... jhawk: You mean vertical pulse signal strength is now better. There are, of course, no visible changes. ezyang: Work on modernizing [scripts] autoinstallers is proceeding. [I am] still looking for people to help out. xavid: Debathena printed CD-Rs. I would like to motion $600 for 1000 CD-Rs. [From the four corners of the room, kaduk, jhawk, mitchb, and pbaranay cringe at the misuse of "motion" instead of "move to allocate"] jhawk: This fiscal year? xavid: Should be doable, depending on whether we use IS&T for ordering. pbaranay: What is the plan for handing them out? broder: They will have a blank spot on the label on which we put the version and date they were burned. Some Debathena maintainers will be responsible for keeping them stocked in the office. pbaranay: I still think it would be really cool to do some major effort to get them handed out to freshmen. Perhaps something like giving them out at a table in the lobby of W20? xavid: Certainly there is some plan to hand them out at the activities midway, possibly at some of our events like Computer Tours. We can discuss other plans for handing out later. nelhage: I would like to have seen a mail indication that you were planning to go ahead with this allocation, rather than simply playing with the idea. geofft: For the treasurer, or anyone else who is doing mental math, after the previous allocations tonight, how much money do we have left now? kaduk: $3200 if we use the reunion allocation; $4200 if we do not. Office Report: jhamrick: I sent out final reminder emails about drawers. This should all be resolved in a week. If [alumni] don't get back to me by next Monday, they lose their drawers. We should be getting back swap space B. I am also planning to have an alumni swap space where members who aren't around regularly can leave one item or so. geofft: Are we out of staples? kaduk: [holding a large bag from the monolith] Ummm... no? jhawk: We are certainly out of Swingline staples. kaduk: [pulls Swingline staples from that bag] No. mitchb: Those who are late night denizens of the office, may have noticed that it tends to become knuckle-chillingly freezing. I called facilities a few weeks back, and they said to just turn off the perimeter units. This did prevent them from blowing cold air, but not stop cold air coming from the ceiling. I called them again and they said they have fixed an actuator or something. Indeed, it seems to be less cold now. jhamrick: It is 76 degrees right now. iannucci: Regarding Cokecomm, Klondike Bars are delicious jhamrick and mitchb: There are Klondike Bars?! [someone]: jhamrick, what would you do for a Klondike bar? jhamrick: I would pay for one. [someone]: Well, that's boring. jhawk: Back on the topic of staplers, has anyone seen the two 747s? ezyang: It appears not. Other: quentin: I would like to call attention to the fact that geofft is, in fact, at a SIPB meeting. mitchb: I would like to call attention to the fact that right before the meeting, I asked if he was staying, and he said he wasn't. quentin: I would like to note that it seems like we got a large amount of work on SIPB projects done this week. [laughter] broder: Speak for yourself! nelhage: There has been a scare involving a 2^52 collision attack against SHA1. This has resulted in many SIPB folks generating new PGP keys. As a result, there will be a small key-signing party after the meeting. Other Other: mitchb: I note there are a lot of people here without chairs, and its coming up on the end of the year... just saying. [laughter and some discussion] mitchb: I am not serious about it; there is a reason I left it for Other Other. But if someone else is serious... quentin: There are 2 nice hacks in Killian. You should check them out. pbaranay: One is Athena-themed. ezyang: Wrong Athena. geofft: I think there is only one of her. jhamrick: It's finals week. [several people]: Is it? / Really? / Oh my? iannucci: Apparently, some of us just noticed. jesstess: I am taking a Freshman GIR for money on Thursday. iannucci: Do you know which? jesstess: Nope, I don't get to know until I show up. iannucci: There aren't that many. Couldn't you, like, check the schedule. The meeting was adjourned at 19:52:18. Minutes taken and submitted by fawkes.