Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2023-08-07 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by colclark. In attendance were Student keyholders: amigdal, colclark, huydai, psvenk, rgabriel Associate keyholders: bds, kenta, markchil, toomas Members: hstennes, rengz Guests: '() Administrivia: [pre-meeting discussion about cluedumps] kenta: I'd like to put in my 2 cents. We should do cluedumps, but also have lower-barrier-to-entry "lightning talks" which are ~5 minutes long. One possibility is to schedule ~6 in a block; another one (like what I did with integer factorization a few months ago) is just "I'll talk about this for 5 minutes after the SIPB meeting". I would recommend this because it's fun to talk, but it can also be intimidating, so having lower barriers to entry for some people would be good. colclark: Sounds good. I'll reach out to javsolis to ask if he is up to run this; otherwise, psvenk and I will. colclark: Also, where's the spreadsheet for cluedumps? psvenk: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QJgGZJqUtL24VbBsA2XzlG84cZLLKfRy-L4IpKxzhyw/edit?usp=sharing colclark: Next week's (and only next week's) meeting will be in 4-146 [psvenk types on colclark's computer to access Zoom chat] colclark: Rare instance of psvenk on Windows colclark: Also, we do now have a Midway table (Sep 1, 14:30-16:30). Can anyone commit to being there? rgabriel, psvenk: I can be there. colclark: I'll probably be bouncing between there and three other tables, but I'll be present in the room. Project Reports: huydai: dormdigest continues. We have been working on the frontend, and the parsing has been fixed so that you can see proper email titles. One issue we've run into is that Scripts has a max packet size of 1MB, so we'll need to split larger emails into multiple chunks. I wonder if there is another way; e.g., a SQL service we could use. rgabriel: You can probably upload the emails to another location and just store a pointer. amigdal (in chat): You should be able to send it as multiple queries, appending to an entry in the database. kenta: I imagine you would create a SIPB AFS space and reference that over the Web. I'm curious about what exactly you mean by "packet", because I'm sure you don't mean an Internet IP packet, but something higher-level. huydai: It's an email packet, and SQL treats each of those as one transaction. kenta: So it's a MySQL packet. huydai: Yes. huydai: Also, re amigdal, I think we can just split it across multiple entries in the database. I've tried it on the XVM server, but it was slow. There was an email with 6 pictures (~2 MB), and it took me 20 seconds to load it. kenta: I'm not a SQL maintainer, but it's the sort of thing where you could ask the SQL maintainer to make an exception to allow larger blobs in your case. [dormsoup discussion] colclark: Hydrant continues. eeshan isn't here to talk about why he needs OpenAI credits to merge Hydrant and CourseRoad. markchil: Project DB continues. We went live about a year ago. If a project is not edited for 365 days, it gets marked as inactive. There is supposed to be a series of reminder emails (increasing in frequency and annoyance) starting 31 days before the one-year mark; it turns out that for some reason, these reminder emails were not being sent out. However, one "this project was deactivated" email did go through. So, apologies for the issues, and make sure your projects don't get marked as inactive. We'll try to get the reminder emails working again as soon as possible. huydai: Notably, hwops was deactivated. bds: jmvidal will be here for another year, so I think he can take over as the point person, but I need to confirm with him. rgabriel: Matrix continues. There is a SIPB space now and it actually works. colclark: How do we feel about private rooms being bridged from Mattermost to Matrix? psvenk: I don't see a huge privacy issue here, but if people have objections, I guess we could not do that Other: bds: What's the best non-Web client for Matrix? rgabriel: There is Nheko for Linux. bds: This is the one that I am using. I was wondering if there are other ones. psvenk: I've seen other ones like Quaternion. rgabriel: From the ones that I have tried so far, there's few clients with a large feature set, like single-sign on (Touchstone). The ones that I tried are: Element (web/Electron), Cinny (web), Fluffychat (multi-platform, not web) and Nheko (desktop, Qt). huydai: What's the MIT Minecraft status? colclark: wsmoses hasn't been responding. huydai: How have you been trying to contact him? colclark: Discord and Mattermost [discussion about Minecraft] colclark: If you go to the spaceforce.com website, there are "intelligence" and "leadership" sliders, and if you drag down the intelligence slider all the way, you get "Information Technology". psvenk: .com? colclark: Yes, their recruiting website is .com kenta: xscreensaver (typically used on Linux) is now available for Android via F-Droid colclark: Why can't people just turn off their phones? kenta: It's eye candy! And one of the settings is for only running when charging. rgabriel: Yeah, I was going to ask if it actually works as a screensaver, because the xscreensaver for iOS doesn't actually work as a screensaver for iOS reasons. kenta: Most of the screensavers attempt to not have the same pixels on all the time, but because it's free software you can make it do anything you want, including showing a static image to burn something into your screen. rgabriel: You can also make it your wallpaper, so now I can have an animated bouncing cow as my wallpaper. bds: I don't know if this is a new Mastodon update, but the fuzzball picture now has a blinding white background. My eyes are burning; please make it transparent. Other Other: huydai: I finally made it in the newspaper. I was out at a furry meet in Davis Square and they were taking pictures. bds: When are we going to have a fuzzball mascot costume? psvenk: Which paper? huydai: The Somerville Times. I had to travel around for 2 hours to find this paper because the Somerville Public Library doesn't even have the Somerville Times. kenta: Re fuzzball mascot costume, I will note that the main mascot costume at Stanford is homemade, so if we want to make a homemade mascot costume, it is doable with student/student-level effort. colclark: File this under SIPB rave. huydai: We could commission it and have a prize. psvenk: Newest SIPB merch colclark: Maybe we could have fuzzball beanies with a fuzzball at the top. huydai: Did the merch arrive? colclark: Yes, it's in my basement. huydai: So you are holding a large quantity of SIPB money in your basement. colclark: Well, if I am SIPB… You can call me "John SIPB" now. rengz: Wait, is that in the basement that flooded? colclark: No rgabriel: So, the one that's flooded is the EC ILG now? colclark: Yes The meeting was adjourned at 19:57. Minutes taken and submitted by psvenk.