Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 7/27/1998 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by elliot. In attendance were Voting members: yonah, elliot, pipa, sepherke, yandros | jered, jdaniel, klmitch Associate members: jemorris, jweiss, cordelia, jhawk, mhpower, jmmikkel | ghudson, marc, srz, mycroft Non-voting members: Prospectives: tivol, lnemzer, Martyn Peck, lockhart, jjnichol, deberg | sly, golem, justom Guests: alrhodes@cpis.net Treasurer's Report: pipa: The treasurer still sucks. yandros: The treasurer is probably playing softball right now. Chairman's Report: Office Report: jhawk: Monty thinks cutter-john's ethernet card fried itself. We don't seem to have any spares. Regardless of whether it actually fried or was misdiagnosed, we should get a spare. I move to allocate $100. [second; white-ballot] jhawk: I think Monty will do it. jhawk: I move to reimburse myself 5.78 from the auction fund for batteries for flashlights and hanging things I bought. [second; white ballot] tivol: Monty wrote and built a cute hack to control the volume of the cd player from remote machines. It was running on cutter-john, but that's dead now. It was neat while it lasted. jjnichol: The keyboard on milquetoast has been flaky, unplugging and replugging the keyboard helps. I've been told you should power the computer off before doing so. jhawk: Someone should figure out whether it's the keyboard, cable, or Mac. It's perhaps worth noting that writing "I don't work" on keyboards in permanent marker is a bad idea. Writing "Yes, I do" may or may not be. jhawk: mary-kay-commandos' monitor was swapped with bart-savagewood's secondary monitor. The monitor which was on mkc continues to have some glitches and probably should be replaced, but I'm not sure yet. klmitch moved x15-cruise-basselope's mouse to bart-savagewood. bart-savagewood's keyboard has flaky 'w', not apparently coke related. jweiss decided to report xcb's memory panics to hotline, although it may get replaced by an Ultra10 RSN. yandros: When Brad started writing on the keyboard I told him it was a bad idea, and he said "if it works, we can write 'yak is a bonehead' on it instead." Office Cleaning Report: pipa: It happened; the office looks clean now. please Don't overfill trashcans. jhawk: It does seem, despite prior statements, that the office only gets vacuumed on request. Please ask people emptying trash cans to vacuum, and update the board, which currently says it was last vacuumed on the 21st. MIT Computing Report: mhpower: Netscape 4.05 becomes the default on athena tomorrow. On a related note, it was announced today that if you read your mail with Netscape 4.05, anyone can execute arbitrary code on your machine by sending you mail that you read. This has the advantage that it provides users with multiple ways to lose, rather than constraining them to lose only via Java. jered: I believe that the cwis/web-agents group still believes that such things will be fixed in a "timely manner" by Netscape. mhpower: August 7th. jweiss: The 8.2.8 release should go to early test tonight. Current plan is for 8.2 to go public tomorrow. sly: On a related note, Host Explorer fails when trying to connect to an 8.2 machines. There is a workaround. jweiss: The dialups (will) have the workaround. mycroft: I heard a rumor that jhawk will be releasing a binary patch for the Netscape security issue. Computer Services: jhawk: We finally got new seagate disks (baracudas to replace medalist pros), although with similar numbers of defects. We got frobs to convert the cables for them. I move to allocate $150 for these from the office budget because it's a pain to get reimbursed out of the server budget. [Why is it hard?] jhawk: Greg said it is. jered: That isn't a very good reason. [second; passes 3-0-6] jhawk: We're looking at adding more power to the machine room. there's a non-zero chance we'll actually get emergency power. SIPB Backup Report: foley: charon and bloom-picayune were done, penguin-lust is being done now. kretch: AFS was not done last week. Publications Report: jdaniel: Only the office copy left of iMatlab. klmitch: There's only 1 extra copy in the back. Move to allocate $50 to buy 50 copies of iMatlab. [second; white ballot] R/O Report: It some time starts around the end of August. IAP Report: '() CokeComm Report: pipa: The jerk is back in town. The jerk bought soda. If you owe me money, pay me now. jered: Is there candy? pipa: Yes, in the candy drawer (in the back). Other: klmitch: pzephyr was released. pipa: Official Athena docs are seriously out of date. sepherke: There are no more international versions of Frame, as of version 5.5. elliot: We have a guest. alrhodes@cpis.net: I work with Andy. I hack for the government. ["and he's here to help us"] Other Other: tivol: The Internet was shocked to learn that www.ourfirsttime.com was a hoax. jered: UPS shipments containing ups's are extremely dense. mhpower: There were 10 explosions and an eight-alarm fire in Davis Square yesterday. pipa: I'm moving on Saturday. Meet me at Fenway to help me move to Random. Please help. marc: jered needs a haircut or a shave. mycroft: UPS has announced that high-volume shippers will be required by sometime in '99 to supply UPS with shipping data over the net. justom: In the Tour de France today, Italian Marco Pantani gained 9 minutes on defending champion Jan Ullrich putting him 6 minutes in first place, with American Bobby Julich in second. srz: It's sunny. Everyone look at Chad report: jhawk: Frisbee, perhaps near the oval, after the meeting. The meeting was adjourned at 19:50. Minutes taken and submitted by yonah.