========================================================= NOTE: These are DRAFT minutes until this note is removed. ========================================================= Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2014-06-02 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by dove. In attendance were Voting members: cereslee codetaku dove dwilson iannucci k_sunter phurst presbrey tboning | mingy Associate members: achernya wings | andersk glasgall Prospectives: jrafidi tthoma24 Guests: Administrivia: achernya: Continuing the saga from last week, i'd like to allocate $1800 for the majority of a new office head; to be 2014's mkc. This includes all the parts except for a 27" monitor. dove: Where's the rest of the money coming from? achernya: Next budget cycle; the monitor will cost about $900. It would be nice for the office head to not displace mkc onto a crappier monitor. dove: Does it have Blu-ray read/write? achernya: It does. We plan on dual-booting Windows with it, but what we actually want to do is see if we can run Windows in a VM and pass through the graphics card. If that doesn't work we'll dual-boot. codetaku: Have fun trying to set that up. dove: Waiting for someone to say the magic words. codetaku: Usually not for something this expensive. phurst: Motion to white ballot. I object. [Motion passes 10-0.] tboning: We had $2400 give or take, we now have about $600. If you have office supplies, doors for shelves, that sort of thing... achernya: Do you have a plan for what to do with the rest? tboning: Nothing that will spend that much. glasgall: Hard disks, we never have enough spare ones. dove: What do Aerons cost? achernya: I think like $900. dove: There will be a membership election for jrafidi at the end of this meeting. SIPB Projects Report: glasgall: After weeks of figuring out what we're doing, the final stage of moving the XVM machines onto the non-crashy RAID is undergoing. If you're affected you got an e-mail; your VM will be paused for about 1 minute/GB. iannucci: sql.mit.edu was mentioned in [?]'s thesis defense at csail. You can apparently check a box to get CryptDB on your wordpress. achernya: We had fun cooperating with PDOS to facilitate this. iannucci: How did you get 120,000 queries? achernya: We traced them. iannucci: Were users notified? achernya: Yes. achernya: The e-mail and website change hasn't gone out, but there's a new Scripts test server running Fedora 20. There are one or two known bugs that are fairly minor I haven't been able to address related to icons not showing up on directory listings. glasgall: There's also at least one major bug. Ruby apps don't work. achernay: We're missing one Ruby gem that I need to install. Standard caveats apply for Trac; if you upgrade it you won't be able to use it on Scripts prod. Cutover is in 4 weeks. jrafidi: The current Roost 2 beta sitting at jrafidi.scripts is being updates at random intervals from Github. Kata has added some zsig features that will be going in soon. We'll be meeting after the election. More people should try it out, and we'll have an open issue thing. glasgall: If you want the hostname roost-2.mit.edu... dove: We're going to move this to roost.mit.edu and maybe move Roost 1.0 to roost.mit.edu/legacy. dove: SIPB Fun Night happened. We beat Octodad: Dadliest Catch. We had one person controlling each tentacle, and at every checkpoint it randomized who was controlling what limb. pweaver jumped in and learned the controls for the final boss fight. jrafidi: Was this the hardest difficulty? dove: I don't know if there is a difficulty setting. Other: dove: School's basically over, Commencement is this week. Other Other: '() Membership election for jrafidi: dove: Tell us about yourself? jrafidi: My name's Joey, I'm a senior in 6-2 (mostly in 6-3); I really like doing UI work and most of the fuzzy things like picking colors and fonts. I was on the fencing team for four years. I'm considering trying for the Olympics when I graduate. I went to the junior world championships when I was a sophomore. I lost to the champion in the Top 16. I plan to work on a dragon simulator using Oculus Rift. iannucci: Are you talking about SpaceX? jrafidi: No, that's not what I meant. I'll be going to work at Palantir. achernya: It's been alleged that perhaps you're a web wizard. Pick a member and give them a (preferably alliterative) mythical nickname. jrafidi: XVM is appropriately magical-- iannucci: XVM Xizzard? jrafidi: I'm going to go with Viking; he's the XVM Viking. dwilson: Virtualization Viking? glasgall: My next business cards will say computing necromancer. glasgall: Why Roost? jrafidi: I had a lot to be thankful for for SIPB for services provided; you all keep things running that really ought to be running. I was talking with cereslee; I was going to do something with UI and Roost was the most interesting things. The other thing would be XVM. Even though I'd never done zephyr stuff, it was difficult: infinite scrolling, no memory leaks, bringing people from Barnowl and non-zephyr-users... codetaku: How do you double-space in CSS? jrafidi: Multiply the line-height by 2. phurst: I think that's one of the few instances where the double-space question has been meaningful. dove: How to double-space in roost? jrafidi: Blank message in between each real message. dwilson: Describe an interesting bug you encountered in Roost and how you fixed it if applicable. jrafidi: Please don't judge me on this one. In order to get messages, you have to make a 'message tail' where you tell the server 'I want to start at this position and get everything later/earlier'. davidben would do inclusive stuff, but there's no way to inclusively go up. So it winds up going down, then up, then down. cereslee: You're sitting in the office when everything catches on fire. jrafidi: There's a box over there. cereslee: Which member in the office do you save? iannucci: You don't have to answer that. cereslee: You could pretend davidben's here. jrafidi: I would not save davidben; I'd want someone that could put this entire thing back together. I'd save dove or glasgall. dwilson: You mentioned fonts as one of the things you do. dove: Here we go. dwilson: Are you familiar with the website 'Cheese or Font' and how well have you done on it? jrafidi: No, but I can imagine it would be fun. Are you familiar with 'Pokemon or Startup'? k_sunter: Homeless or Mathematician. dove: Arxiv vs Snarxiv. dwilson: Serial killer or programming language inventor. dove: The office is burning, you choose to ignore the institute policy which is to not fight fires-- iannucci: Why? dove: For this question, it makes sense. Where's the nearest fire extinguisher? jrafidi: I'm tempted to say it's not in this room. dove: Yes. [jrafidi looks outside, points out the extinguisher.] dove: If it's an electrical fire, where's the breaker? jrafidi: Behind that door. glasgall: What's the origin of the name for Roost? jrafidi: I don't know; in the old README it said "Roost: where owls go to sleep." glasgall: Do you know why barnowl is called barnowl? dwilson: Do you know the connection with owls? jrafidi: Is it obvious? dwilson: No. There was a predecessor to barnowl called owl, which was named because it was Athena's messaging system. The idea behind barnowl was that there was some feature (Jabber support?) people really wanted in owl and it was described as a 'pony', and someone implemented it and called it barnowl because if you have a barn you can keep your owls with your ponies. achernya: How many different servers does Roost run on? jrafidi: These are things front-end developers don't know. achernya: Scripts pool + XVM + SQL servers. So anywhere from 16 to more than that. dove: How many at any one time? achernya: Minimum of 4, closer to 11. glasgall: i,i Depends on what dvorak42 is up to. glasgall: You're standing on one bank of a river with two owls and a pony; the owls will cling to the pony's back, but if you have two owls on the back of a pony they'll fight. jrafidi: Can I buy another pony? glasgall: Sure. jrafidi: Then it's trivial. Money solves problems. achernya: Suppose you're in SIPB and the power goes out late at night. What do you do? jrafidi: Am I alone? iannucci: As far as you can tell! jrafidi: If I try to save anything I'll probably fuck it up; I'll lock the door and leave. achernya: The servers, man! You didn't notify anyone! iannucci: Does nagios not notify you? dove: SMR should e-mail out if there's an issue. achernya: We just got external monitoring on our monitoring server. Ops has stopped doing monitoring for us and we haven't yet set up our own network magics for hilarious reasons. dove: Where's the nearest first-aid kit? jrafidi: In the monolith. wings: Is it non-expired. dove: Good question. codetaku: Most of the contents have been replaced within the last year-and-a-half. achernya: But some of them have a half-life of like a year. glasgall: Since most of the work we've seen you do was on Roost; I assume that you're comfortable with JavaScript. What would you change if you could? jrafidi: Combine null and undefined. I actually really enjoy the silly stuff about it. dove: If you could choose to add/remove one thing from the ceiling, what would it be? jrafidi: I'd add a Pokemon. dwilson: Which one? jrafidi: Either a ridiculously fat Snorlax or an awesome-looking Dragonite? cereslee: Charizard. jrafidi: He's too stereotypically loved. dove: Would you object if we put a subwoofer in Snorlax? jrafidi: No because I'd do the same thing. dove: This is the first time a doctor gets to ask the question... I move that Dr. dwilson ask the question. dwilson: I doubt it's the first time a doctor has. Why do you want to be a SIPB member? jrafidi: I admire the work that's been done here; lots of smart people doing good work. There's lots to learn, and it's nice to be around people who are really into what they like and what they do. I learned stuff about MIT and the people here. dove: I'd like to ask that prospectives leave the office. achernya: All one of them. jrafidi: Can I get a drink? [jrafidi elected, 12-0-0.] dove: Congratulations, you're entering the office as a SIPB member. achernya: Stick around to learn all of our secrets. The meeting was adjourned at 20:09. Minutes taken and submitted by phurst.