Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2009-08-31 The meeting was called to order at 19:30:00 by ezyang. In attendance were Voting members: adehnert, broder, ezyang, fawkes, geofft, jhamrick, jesstess, pbaranay, quentin Associate members: asedeno, keithw, mitchb | jhawk Prospectives: pweaver, rye, igutek, mikemeko, ine, jontec, dennison | davidben Guests: Officer Reports: '() SIPB Projects Report: jhamrick: There is now yet another clone of sipbmp3. This one is residing at pika, its name is pikamp3. If you are ever at pika, you can use it to play music. broder: In that vein, while I was stuck on a plane and had nothing better to do, I fixed the AppleScript support for sipbmp3. You can now load the script from snippets, pick your tracks in iTunes, and select something from a dropdown and have it print to sipbmp3 without hanging iTunes while it does this. ezyang: Thanks for letting me know. I have a lot of people who are using the AppleScript. broder: It is now with less hacks. keithw: LAMP received a favorable write-up in MIT's prestigious annual publication, How to Get Around MIT. ezyang: For those who do not know, LAMP is the "Library Access to Music Project." It is essentially a service over MIT cable that lets you listen to music from our very large and fine collection of CDs. quentin: For free. jesstess: And legally! fawkes: It's analog transmission: it's legitimate. pbaranay: I have a publicity update. I'd like to move to allocate $100 to print a poster from CopyTech. Technique can do it for $55 but it will be in two pieces, rather than one. The other public poster printers on campus would have similar problems. pweaver: Prospectives! Wednesday, September 9 at about 5:45pm there will be Computer Tours and Computer Stories with jis. You should show up; it will be awesome. quentin: Sportscast, or rather the Sportscast-MIT Student Cable conglomeration that now exists, will be broadcasting a live HD production of Fredfest. Sportscast is a project where Academic Computing, which then existed, gave us a bunch of money for HD production equipment and then write a bunch of HD production software from scratch and release it open source. keithw did most of it. Office Report: geofft: We have more Ethernet cables from the RCCs. (to give out to dorm residents) [introductions for the benefit of new prospectives] ezyang: I'm going to give a condensed version of the spiel. So, you're sitting in the SIPB office. mitchb: You are here. [puts finger on desk]. ezyang: SIPB, or the Student Information Processing Board is a computing group at MIT. It's major purpose is to improve computing at MIT, whether this is by helping random users that stop by the office or running useful services for the MIT community or hacking on something cool because it might actually turn out to be useful latter on. Members have done all of these things and more. The office is also just a great place to hang out. SIPB has a bunch of projects that you can get hooked onto. SIPB also encourages you to start your own projects -- to show up to a meeting and say "hey, this is something cool I am working on; anybody else wanna help out?" or ask some of the knowledgeable hackers here if you get stuck on something. This year we are also trying something different, if you are interested. We have a bunch of people who have volunteered to be point contacts for you. They are willing to check up on you, to help you find something you are interested working on, etc. So if you are interested in that, when our secretary comes and prospectivizes you, please let him know. fawkes: Oh, this is my job... awesome. ezyang: and he will forward this information to me. Becoming a SIPB member is kind of a nebulous process. We don't have some set of rules that says "you do 64 hours of work for the SIPB and then... " broder: Wait! That's all?! ezyang: "... you become a member." Generally, the first and easiest way to get on that path is to hang out in the office, get to know people, and SIPB as a community will get to know you. We will get to know who you are as a person and what you like. In these interactions you might get shuffled off into doing something! I know that's how I got started. Obviously there is the general concept of contributing to our projects. But that doesn't necessarily just have to mean coding. It can mean helping write documentation, helping to run events like Cluedumps, that will be happening fall, where lecturers come and give talks on topics that are of interest to them and the SIPB. pbaranay: With food! ezyang: with food. And there are IAP classes where lots of SIPB members are like "hey, I know a lot about this" and they put on a class for like 4 hours where members from both inside and outside the MIT community come and learn from us. Anyway, I will stop talking now... but in short, Welcome! I hope you will stay with us and be part of our community. jhamrick: I'd like to add: it's great if you want to join any of the projects that are already in existence, but if they don't match up with your interests but you want to be a part of SIPB, you are always welcome to start your own. That's how I got involved. Other: keithw: There will be a Moonlight Sail this Friday night, September 4th at 8pm at the MIT Sailing Pavilion. I would like to invite the entire SIPB to come on a boat with me. I suggest that we leave at least one member of the scripts team on shore in case it sinks, but other than that you are all welcome. geofft: Keith, will you be singing "I'm on a Boat"? keithw: Geoffrey Thomas, Quentin, and various freshman will together be singing "I'm on a Boat" as part of a medley of other favorite SIPB songs. geofft: What... are... other favorite.. mitchb: Don't! ask that question. You will get rickrolled. keithw: ... in costumes of their own design. pweaver: This Friday is the ASA midway. We are running a booth. You should show up. Talk to freshman. broder: Has there been an allocation for CokeComm stuff? [debate about whether this is just for CPW] [discussion of the amount] pweaver: I would like to allocate the amount specified for the previous Activities Midway. White ballot? keithw: I feel like some cap to the figure is appropriate. pweaver: $150? geofft: $150 with encouragement to spend less? broder: $150 with encouragement to spend what was spent last time. [someone]: last year it was $75 for the midway, $150 for the party. broder: We had a party? ezyang: Oh yea! jhamrick: The party was awesome! broder: No, I think the party was just CPW. geofft: No... I think we had an inode and fsck block party for CPW and a fsck and inode party for orientation. broder: I thought we just switched them every CPW? mitchb: You're supposed to fsck like every 27 days or something... pweaver: I'd like to allocate $75 for the ASA midway. Other Other: broder: Term is sooner than you think! ezyang: Rush is currently ongoing. broder: Ubuntu is holding Ubuntu developer week this week, where there are a series of fairly substantial core members of the Ubuntu development team giving tutorials about various aspects of Ubuntu development on IRC including the actual development process, how packaging works, all that kind of stuff. For more information see wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek jesstess: IRC is a very ... brave choice for use as a teaching channel. They do clean up the logs and post them somewhere and you may be better off just reading those. broder: I was looking at the logs from the first one yesterday and it seemed pretty helpful. mitchb: I once stumbled upon fedora's packaging logs from IRC and it looked kinda painful and I was kinda glad I wasn't there. broder: I think teaching people packaging is kind of guaranteed to be painful. mitchb: Yes. Mostly because people couldn't even install the developer tools package. And that takes up half the class. pweaver: Wasn't there going to be something about burning more Debathena CDs for the midway? broder: Sure. We can do that. The meeting was adjourned at 19:50:21. Minutes taken and submitted by fawkes.