Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2012-11-19 The meeting was called to order at 19:30:00 by bbaren. In attendance were Voting members: achernya bbaren dwilson omalley1 phurst Associate members: afarrell dhanus glasgall jhawk lfaraone neboat nelhage price quentin tlyu Prospectives: abost ceres dlaw codetaku tboning vasilvv Guests: adat bevacqua Administrivia: '() SIPB Projects Report: achernya: Yesterday, regularly-scheduled maintenance on scripts left it unable to boot VMs. Luckily, VMs were running so there was no outage. Debian really sucks and really needs to release a version of Xen that understands GRUB 2. dlaw: We had another cluedump about the future of social robotics. There will be no cluedump this week due to the Thanksgiving vacation. tboning: Dormbase had a hackathon on Sunday. We did stuff. vasilvv: zsr was reinstalled on the new machine because the old machine was very old and made very annoying noises. New zsr is already functional, though I'm going to fix some other things; it is now able to play Youtube videos again. lfaraone: Did you upgrade the OS? vasilvv: Yes, to Ubuntu 12.04 with Debathena workstation. Other: dlaw: Changes to access to W20 are coming up. Starting Tuesday, you'll need an MIT id from 1-6AM. lfaraone: On a related note, if you need an ID card, you should talk to the vice-chair and we can fix that problem. achernya: Recent changes to MIT Kerberos means that graphical login on Athena 9.4 do not work. bbaren: How long have they been deprecated? achernya: 2007. This means portnoy is no longer operable as a graphical login. jhawk: The date of lack of support is no longer a good indicator; for example, the VAX is perfectly usable, though I assume it suffers from the same failure. achernya: Doesn't it also suffer from more failure since it's only krb4? bbaren: I was under the impression that the UID is a signed int so most people can't log in. jhawk: In the case of Aaron Schwartz, the JSTOR downloader, we learn that the FBI engages in this practice of taking action to preserve the contents of the RAM of laptops that they think they might want to search so they can later decrypt the hard drive. I find this disturbing. tlyu: Do they take measures to not inspect the contents of the ram? jhawk: Unclear. tlyu: I think that's how evidence preservation often works. dwilson: Some time ago there was discussion about replacing CSW. Are we waiting for the new iMacs to come out? jhawk: CSW is half busted for weird hardware reasons, and the new iMacs are orderable but not shipping. We could spend between $1250 and $1900. quentin: MIT pricing is lower. I'd say get the low-end 27-inch and upgrade the RAM ourselves. dwilson: I'm fine with whichever. achernya: The Apple store for MIT doesn't allow ordering the 27" iMac, only the 21". jhawk: Anyway, let's wait a week. achernya: Since we're considering getting a new computer with a nice monitor, how do we feel about a 30" monitor? quentin: I think we should use it to soak budget. achernya: I wasn't intending to allocate. jhawk: I'd feel like everybody would watch my screen. tlyu: There is now an implementation of Kerberos for Android which you can develop for using Java. jhawk: Does it have a cool name? tlyu: Kerberos for Android. jhawk: So no. vasilvv: I'd like to talk about chairs. First, the good news: bbaren and achernya are awesome. Now the bad news; some of the chairs in the office are not in a very good state. They are usable but we should probably do something about the state of the chairs. lfaraone: So you're volunteering to look at the warranty status of these chairs and replace the ones that are under warranty? Or am I mishearing. vasilvv: OK, I'm volunteering! Other Other: dwilson: Drop date is Wednesday, Thanksgiving is Thursday. omalley1: Would the new people mind introducing themselves? jhawk: We normally do room-wide introductions. [The office introduces themselves.] quentin: If anybody is interested in telephony, the Verge has an interesting photo set. bbaren: I can confirm it's horrifying. omalley1: I saw Argo, it was really interesting. The meeting was adjourned at 19:47:23. Minutes taken and submitted by phurst.