Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2012-11-12 The meeting was called to order at by . In attendance were Voting members: achernya bbaren dwilson ine omalley1 phurst Associate members: andersk glasgall jbarnold jhawk lfaraone | afarrell price Prospectives: belzner christy codetaku dennison sqshemet vasilvv Guests: Administrivia: achernya: Since no-one has objected, I will be moving the servers that are currently in the office to the machine room. If you want to use them, let someone with SMR access know. SIPB Projects Report: sqshemet: There was a cluedump about Programming Language Theory. There will be one this Wednesday, 8:30 in 4-231. It will be Nick talking about social robotics. lfaraone: I'd like to propose SIPB allocate $15 for an external floppy drive. achernya: Didn't waseem say he'd donate the one he bought? jhawk: Amend to make it contingent on waseem not donating the one he bought. lfaraone: Sure. bbaren: Second, white ballot. [White ballot passes.] omalley1: Dormbase hackathon Sunday for anybody who's interested. Starts midday-ish. vasilvv: There was a Hackamon on Saturday. I believe about 15 people attended. It was in general good. Other: vasilvv: I would like to discuss the state of medications in the monolith; when I checked I found we have large boxes of different medications that are expired, and some of them are a year expired. Some things are six years expired. What should we do? dwilson: Throw out the expired ones and get unexpired ones using the standard allocation. jhawk: Not necessarily in that order. vasilvv: I also think we shouldn't buy giant boxes, but buy reasonably small sized ones which have a chance of actually being used up to 50% before expiration. lfaraone: There also exist companies whose entire business is to staff medicine cabinets. We could ask MIT if they could service SIPB. bbaren: Would you like to be in charge of restocking the cabinet? vasilvv: Sure. bbaren: We're also going to get more canned air, since we're out. lfaraone: Can't we can it ourselves? glasgall: Fedora 18 is delayed again again. Other Other: '() Membership election for christy and dennison: dennison: I'm Drew Dennison, senior in 6-2. I've been on and off involved since freshman year; I spent the majority of my time doing Dormbase with omalley1 and ine. christy: My name's Christy, I'm also a senior, and I've been watching over achernya's shoulder for Scripts things. I also started up the whole SIPB IEEE dinner planning. I also was involved in the Scripts cluedump and made the slides more pretty. This is my first real SIPB semester. phurst: Say something bad about your favorite programming language. dennison: It's hard to do low-level bit twiddling in Python. christy: There's nothing wrong with Ruby. bbaren: You're wrong. glasgall: christy, how would you double space a faculty dinner? christy: Given that there are 16 chairs in some room that they might hold the dinner at, I would put one person in every other spot, or double-space the plates and double-space the portions on the plates. glasgall: If in the course of running faculty dinners, you came across an incident where the dining philosophers problem applied, how would you solve it? christy: Get another chopstick. lfaraone: What if they're deadlocked? christy: Launch food into people's mouths. lfaraone: What if they were MIT professors? christy: I couldn't throw food at them. I'd give them an interesting problem to think about until they dropped the chopstick. jhawk: Discuss the state of debugging tools with your favorite language as it relates to the MIT undergrad computer science curriculum. dennison: I've used pdb a handful of times; I've preferred to just reason through the code. This underscores the fact that debuggers are complicated and before 828 I didn't know what they were doing. jhawk: I'm concerned about the fact that nobody who learns Python through course VI learns anything about debuggers. dennison: That's true; I didn't do serious debugging until my first internship at GM. I think 828 is starting to change that, though mostly I just run to achernya. jhawk: Do you think 828 is going to change people's python? dennison: No, I more meant for me personally. christy: There's a gem called debugger, which I use. It gives you the step-by-step ability to jump lines, kind of like gdb. There's no relation to course VI since people don't really use Ruby. Actually, no, 6.170 uses Rails this year. There's also .inspect, which is a nice way of splaying out an object. vasilvv: What's your favorite obscure thing in the office? christy: Probably the Nyancat, though I can't imagine why. jhawk: Obscure? dennison: I like the BSD poster. glasgall: Do you know the meaning of 4.4 > 5.4? dennison: There was some kind of split in the source code? glasgall: The assertion is that version 4.4 is greater than 5.4. christy: I like the girl with the turkey in the corner. omalley1: What is the most poorly-designed piece of technology that you own/use? dennison: Before I got my Mac, I'd have to say my Thinkpad. I used to be the biggest Mac hater, then I won one in the competition, and now I'm a fanboy. I'd say it's the attention to detail or lack thereof; Apple made me think about design more. christy: I'd say the motion sensor switches in the Burton Conner bathroom; they seem to be intermittently functioning. jhawk: You don't think it's covered in dirt? christy: It's on the wall. glasgall: You don't think it's covered in dirt? christy: I wish GDB had a GUI so you could see the stack and zoom out and stuff. glasgall: That exists. GDB has its own, and then there's the frontend, and other stuff. dennison: I heard a vim vs emacs, and I'm definitely in the emacs camp. christy: Definitely emacs. glasgall: Do you actually use emacs or do you use TextMate? christy: I use Sublime and Emacs. dennison: I use WordPerfect. bbaren: Can you identify these items? dennison: Hard disk platters. christy: Shark banana. dennison: That looks like a grumpy fuzzball. bbaren: Close. dwilson: It's the Dust Puppy, it's a character from the comic UserFriendly that looks like the Grumpy Fuzzball. bbaren: Can you identify *these* items? christy: They were the rings that held the gavel? bbaren: They are write-enable rings for 9-track magtape. jhawk: Please explain the difference between 9-track and 8-track tapes. dennison: One can store 9 layers and one can store 8? bbaren: 8-track tape is for music, 9-track tape is for operating systems. achernya: This question from geofft, for christy. Compare and contrast Opera and opera, and when would you recommend that a user switch? christy: Well opera is the greatest thing ever, because it's music, and... please don't die oh my gosh. [jhawk has climbed up and retrieved 9-track tapes.] dennison: What's on there? jhawk: I don't know, I'm a little disturbed this one has my name on it. dennison: What's the storage capacity on that, like 100M? jhawk: Up to 6250 bpi and 2000 feet. achernya: Almost 18 megabytes according to google. bbaren: Please divide 1743 by 6, long-hand on the board. achernya: Can we make this a race? bbaren: That seems to go counter to the purpose... but I guess it's a race now. [christy writes 300. dennison writes 295.] vasilvv: To elaborate on the opera question, do you get upset when the dramas of Wagner are called operas? christy: Well, when you hear Ride of the Valkyries, there's supposed to be singing over that. It doesn't *bother* me since I would consider them operas, since it means just music and test. vasilvv: Since when does opera have dancing as an integral part? christy: Not integral, but a lot of them. afarrell: I smell an IAP class. bbaren: When is IAP? christy: Sooner than you think. achernya: As you may have noticed, the office hasn't changed much over the past few years. christy, when are we getting a new couch? christy: Whenever mitchb gets a van. That's the only constraint. achernya: Both of you, what else should we change in the office? christy: I think we should fix the chairs. Other than that, I want to put in movie nights. It could also use some pink. achernya: Is that [the spectrum allocation chart] not enough? dennison: I would move a lot of things out, I'd put in brand new desks, Thunderbolt displays, new carpeting, pull the junk off the wall, put up some TVs and make a dashboard, and try to replace the front wall with a full glass wall. I might pull stuff off the ceiling, though that might be heresy. dwilson: Please locate the nearest first-aid kit, fire extinguisher, circuit breaker, and save in case of fire box. [christy and dennison do so.] glasgall: Locate the first aid kit that is not full of expired medicine. jhawk: None of the kit medicine is expired. christy: There's probably a fire thing out in the hallway, and I'd pull that. vasilvv: What is present on every shelf of the monolith? christy: Paper and pens? vasilvv: No; hint: we should get rid of it. sqshemet: Dust? bbaren: Drew, how do you double space in Mac OS? dennison: Hit enter at the end of every line. You could probably do something in AppleScript. achernya: What happens to your Mac once you've double-spaced it. dennison: You get two. christy: So where is the nearest other medkit? bbaren: I'd say in CAC. vasilvv: Someone asks for an Ethernet cable, what do you do? christy: Tell them to go to IS&T? bbaren: Ask them where they live, and if they give a dorm, get a cable. glasgall: If someone asks for the combo, what do you do? christy: Ask for their ID; if that fails, tell them to log in and ask them to use tellme combo. vasilvv: What else can you tellme? dennison: Root? bbaren: There's `off`. vasilvv: There's also `universe` and `the universe`. price: Why do you want to become a SIPB member? christy: Just to use the microwave, obviously. No, because I want to be cool, I want to be able to sign these dinner e-mails as a member. I can also better represent SIPB to newbies. dennison: Four of my closest friends are SIPB members, and I'd like to expand my 'learning stuff' crowd from Simmons to SIPB. bbaren: At this time, I'd like to ask all non-members to leave the office. [Begin closed session.] [christy elected, 8-0-0.] [dennison elected, 7-0-1.] [End closed session.] The meeting was adjourned at 20:16:14. Minutes taken and submitted by phurst.