Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2018-01-15 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by mcyoung. In attendance were Student keyholders: slz, mcyoung, emmabat, andersk | ikdc Associate keyholders: '() Members: manjola, twang6, sargentd, mcameron, lantian, chxu, ivanaf Guests: '() Administrivia: mcyoung: Well, y'know, Van told me there would be an allocation for Hyades, but Van's not here Project Reports: manjola: Where do people submit the question for Ask SIPB? mcyoung: Presumably there's a mailing list -- [Van walks in] -- ah! Speak of the devil! manjola: The Tech is asking if we have a Google Doc or website... slz: You could do a Google Form and also an email address manjola: If there's an address, who gets it? slz: It's just a list, do you want to be added to it? You probably should be [adds manjola to list] It's just a large-ish list with a lot of people on it manjola: And how do people answer it? slz: I think it's like, you could ask someone in SIPB, or a course 6 professor. You do research to answer it. manjola: So it's up to who's running it? slz: Yeah, if you're in charge of it, it's up to you to write it and research it. manjola: Could you send a draft to people in the office? slz: Yeah, of course mcyoung: I was gonna suggest, every so-and-so period to send out a digest of asked questions and ask people to claim them slz: You can definitely delegate mcyoung: Ask people to claim a question and write a column. You can write some yourself if you want manjola: And how often should it be? slz: It predates me even mcyoung: I think the right thing is to vary the frequency depending on how many questions you get slz: It doesn't have to be regular. You can release them whenever one's ready mcyoung: But it does just give us a canonical space in the Tech which we could even use for other things slz: Though the point is to be factual, not to present opinions, which is unlike the previous columns we've written -- those of course presented facts, but were op-eds, mostly opinions. Ask SIPB would be the other way round manjola: And should we just present facts...say we want to start. Should the first column be an introduction before we solicit questions, or...? mcyoung: I think we should present a full post also including an introduction. Every post should include at the bottom a pointer to "this is where to go to ask questions." You can ask SIPB itself what to write about for the first one mcyoung: Oh yeah Van weren't you going to allocate money? ikdc: Hunt happened ivanaf: People use Messenger or Hangouts for video calls, but we could host open source software versions for people to use. I think we could host 1000 connections using 500 megabites per second and that's a project I want to propose slz: XVM is not in a good state. The vice chair would need to provide physical hardware for that to happen andersk: What do you mean? It will eventually go away but it's working now slz: Would it rely on the server? ivanaf: If it's one person to one person it can rely on the browser but if it's say five people it's five connections per person mcyoung: Since it'll be a while before Hyades hosts production software, couldn't we turn a few spare machines in the SMR into hypervisors? slz: It's literally called XVM ikdc: That's what we already have slz: We shouldn't make an ad hoc hypervisor thing that's XVM but worse. We don't want something neither XVM nor Hyades mcyoung: That's fair. That said, if you're interested in this project, it sounds like an excellent thing to work on slz: It's totally ok to throw something together on XVM, then tell the board, and call it a SIPB project. Also I guess Mirrors, a while ago the primary server had a meltdown. So our eventual goal is to move Mirrors onto Hyades but of course that's not happening for quite a few months. Meanwhile we've thought of a plan -- Anders's idea -- but anyway, one possible thing is to create something that runs on Scripts but redirects queries to the gigantic NFS server in the form of an FCGI script. I'm currently writing it, it looks like it won't take that much work, given that the library we're using actually works. I'm investigating that. If you're curious talk to me after the meeting twang6: How did the server melt down? slz: It had 1200 days of uptime and decided to stop working, which is not entirely unreasonable mcyoung: Replacing it was an adventure to say the least slz: Replacement is not complete mcyoung: But I wanted to rant about the screws in W91. It has very interesting racks. The screws were all different sizes slz: Or the screw holes. To avoid this kind of unfortunateness we'd like to graft this monstrosity onto scripts. Unfortunately there's also the rsync part. Otherwise the unit parts of Mirrors should work just as well. I have a grand plan of reimagining Mirrors, but I probably don't have time for this grand plan twang6: SIPB-MP3 pretty much now supports everything that /youtube supports mcyoung: I have news from Cel -- work on Hyades continues! Also she asked me to remind everyone that Hyades office hours continue to happen right here from 2:30 to 5:30 every day until I forget when. She was 12 minutes late today because she was in class Other: ikdc: Mystery Hunt happened slz: Why are you crying Van? ikdc: I'm barely awake right now [yawns] slz: Do we know any of the poor souls writing next year's hunt? ikdc: We know some of the poor souls who wrote this year's hunt slz: Venerable SIPB cruft mcyoung: When do SIPB cruft become beatified? ikdc: When they stop showing up slz: Don't they have to work at least two miracles? mcyoung: That's saints mcyoung: In other news, last night I successfully assembled a Java class file. No it was a couple nights ago. For those of you who don't know I've gone insane writing a Java assembler in Rust. Other Other: mcyoung: So I really think SIPB needs a soundboard so we can have crickets for these moments, and a laugh track because my life can only become so much more of a sitcom slz: Also why don't we have a Wiki for internal things? So however many generations can know how things work? ikdc: I suggest we use the existing Wiki mcyoung: We need to find people willing to write articles. That said I don't really want to write anything The meeting was adjourned at 19:53. Minutes taken and submitted by emmabat.