“I’m declaring martial law and disbanding the EC.” —jbarnold Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-02-19 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk, arolfe, aseering, golem, jbarnold, jhawk, kchen, k_lai, mshaw, nelhage, presbrey, tabbott, tilia, wdaher Associate members: asedeno, jemorris, mitchb Prospectives: danjared, jwalden, mathmike, quentin, spang Guests: Treasurer’s Report: tilia: We should spend money. jhawk: Dealing with reimbursements. Chairman’s Report: tabbott: I feel like I should say something ridiculous like “tabbott is now tabbott.” tabbott: We’re going to have an election at the end of the meeting for Quentin. nelhage: I’d like to nominate geofft for membership. <8-0-2, motion passes> tabbott: New document with information for prospectives. jbarnold: It is possible to schedule a meeting on a non-Monday. tabbott: Would be hard to get quorum. [Election of quentin] quentin: I’m a freshman, at the moment a prospective. Worked on Athena Defcon, scripts. Picked up Macs in 1992, switch to Linux in 1997. Found SIPB useful even back then. Knew what SIPB was in middle school. nelhage: Even I can’t claim that. quentin: Remember when www.mit.edu was a SIPB server. If elected I will continue to [???]. Will definitely finish the Defcon sign and components of scripts I have promised to finish. tabbott: Questions for quentin? wdaher: If SIPB were a component in the Athena Defcon sign, what would it be? quentin: SIPB would be like that semifunctional NIC that sort of patches packets and generates spurious packets about nothing and drops relevant packets, but in general functions correctly. asedeno: What data rate? quentin: 3.14159 Mbps nominal, synchronous. asedeno: Full or half duplex? quentin: Synchronous, so half duplex. arolfe: Name how ever many SIPB services in the machine room you can. quentin: Multics, multics@mit.edu; Linerva, linerva@mit.edu; Scripts, scripts@mit.edu; Stuff, stuffmaster@mit.edu; AFS cell, sipb-afs-req; News, news@mit.edu or porn@mit.edu; lots of stuff that doesn’t really have a mailing list like UPS and switches. tabbott: Other things quentin missed? asedeno: LAMP. arolfe: RTFM. tabbott: Joe would be offended if you didn’t mention SQL separately from scripts. nelhage: Of the services you named, how many of the actual machines behind the services can you name? quentin: Linerva, vinegar-pot; charon, charon; (looks at laptop) tabbott: Cheating is not allowed! tabbott: Suppose you’re in the office, a user wanders in and asks you a question you don’t know the answer to. quentin: Point to inessential documents, zephyr to -c sipb, email sipb@mit.edu or appropriate Athena contact, ask other people in the office. presbrey: What postscript command best describes Anders? quentin: Hmm… Anders would be affiliated with setting colors… setcolor? [jhawk fetches PostScript manual] mshaw: What Perl command best describes nelhage? quentin: Toss-up between local declaration and glob operator. arolfe: What service/documentation should SIPB be offering that we don’t? quentin: DNS hosting? tabbott: sipb-dns. We should advertise this service. quentin: Hosting virtual machines. Jabber needs documentation. asedeno: Do you know why, when I link barnowl against ncurses 5.5 or 5.6, all of the spaces disappear. quentin: It’s nelhage’s fault. danjared: How do you feel about keeping barn owls in the server room? quentin: Should have AJAX and webcam! jhawk: SIPB no longer has a separate machine room budget. What does this mean for officers of the board going forward? quentin: “Get it back” would be the optimal answer… no, “getting unlimited access to MIT’s finances” would be the optimal answer. What I’d like to see the board accomplish is for the board to have a contact in IS&T that is generally receptive to the idea of buying servers, etc. jhawk: How do you feel about save in case of fire box? mitchb: Many of this have grappled with this issue. Well I’ve just grappled with the box. quentin: I’d feel sorry for the last person in the office to grab it. quentin: I think I’d throw it out the window. tabbott: It’s pretty heavy. mitchb: An alternative solution is to get it in a 6-hour rated fire thing, go in and close the door. quentin: It’s usually rated to save paper and not humans. mitchb: jhawk has thoughts about how to get compressed air into the box. mshaw: Choose a member of the office and ask them a question. quentin: mitchb, do you know what programming language Soar is written in? mitchb: Python. jhawk: Do you feel you’ve been asked good questions? quentin: I was fretting about the “name as many office heads” question. I don’t feel like my knowledge has been tested yet. presbrey: Chairman lineage? quentin: Can I use something I prepared for this? jbarnold: There’s one other previous chair (besides jbarnold and tabbott) in the room, so you can just point to someone and hope. quentin: I wonder if we were crazy enough to let jhawk chair? jbarnold: No, the office is still here. quentin: mshaw? mshaw: What? I take offense! jbarnold: Name three ways in which discuss is obsolete and sucks. quentin: The web interface looks like it was designed in 1993. andersk: It’s still better than Mailman’s. quentin: It’s impossible to find out what conferences exist. jhawk: You can consult eichin’s .meetings file. Some people use mine. quentin: Discuss exists outside of the web and the march of progress with the exception that…well, I don’t know if the signal/noise ratio has gone down. mitchb: Discuss doesn’t really have a SNR of its own. presbrey: Defend scripts as the future of athena? quentin: scripts will never replace athena, but provides environment to explore modern technologies. nelhage: Defend debathena as the future of athena. quentin: Am I required to defend SIPB services? tabbott: No, you can attack it ruthlessly. quentin: Debathena lets users have an up-to-date distribution that still provides Athena services. jhawk: Name three ways to print multiple copies to Athena printers and discuss ethical implications. quentin: Shell script that iterates over lpr command; edit postscript to request multiple copies (%NumberOfCopies: n), concatenate postscript together multiple times. jhawk: The best way is <>… ethical implications? quentin: Depends on how much you are printing. Would be comfortable printing 10 copies of a one-page document, not 20 copies of a 20-page document. Would tie up a printer in such a way that other jobs cannot be interspersed. tabbott: Suppose someone monitored the printers and counted pages printed by each users. What should be done with this data? Publish it in the Tech? quentin: Don’t publish personal data in the Tech. tabbott: It would save paper! tabbott: What would you guess would be an upper bound on pages someone would print to Athena in a term? quentin: 40 or 50 documents, say 400 pages. tabbott: I think that’s a little low. mshaw: If such a script were to exist, hypothetically of course, would it violate Athena rules of use? quentin: Depends on how the script accesses its data. tabbott: It is publically available information. quentin: I don’t think it’s against the rules, maybe against the spirit. My personal opinion is that how much you use Athena is generally public. jhawk: How do you double-space in two different applications? You can choose the programs. quentin: line-spacing: 200% in CSS. It’s been a while since I’ve written a LaTeX document, don’t remember. Paragraph settings in MS Word for Mac. jhawk: In LaTeX, \usepackage{setspace}, \doublespacing. jwalden: Could you say “line-spacing: 2” in CSS? quentin: I don’t belive so. jwalden: It is actually valid. aseering: Any ideas for future SIPB projects? quentin: Some MIT project for IP TV. tabbott: Would this allow us to play LAMP on our computers? quentin: That would be illegal! mitchb: Defend the chain-saw as the future of SIPB. mitchb: Alternatively, ask yourself a question that you don’t think you know the answer to that you know the answer to. (It’s possible to get this right.) quentin: Can I go with the chain-saw question? tabbott: As I said earlier, the best defense is a good offense. quentin: I believe the chain-saw epitomizes SIPB’s focus on providing technical services to the MIT community, either computer-related or (in this case) more mechanical. The chain-saw provides MIT students with many ways to end their misery. mshaw: Move that the oldest former chair in the room ask The Question. golem: [standing on ladder] Why do you want to be a SIPB member. (Did I do okay? This is my first time asking The Question.) quentin: SIPB: better than sliced bread. mshaw: More serious answer? quentin: I plan to be around here for a very long time (SIPB and MIT). As a freshman, I have more time to contribute to the goals of SIPB. Being a member will further my learning and networking opportunities. (Networking in the people sense. Although, if anyone wants to “network” with me…) tabbott: Invite non-members to leave the office. <13-0-2, quentin elected> Office Report: mshaw: Status of white-board? jhawk: Waiting on k_land. Have baseline material but not mounting. tabbott: We have this broken chair that’s been broken for a while. Anyone want to deal with it? quentin: Sure. Office Cleaning Report: tabbott: Lots of stuff on tables. We should clean it up right now. tabbott: That seems somewhat better. MIT Computing Report: quentin: Network outage in EC west parallel. SIPB Projects Report: arolfe: stuffmaster got mail. [reads mail] arolfe: If anyone wants to sign a photograph of MIT… jhawk: Move to allocate $2 for postage and materials. tabbott: Sent a 1-year report on Linerva project. Bonus points if you find an error in my email. jhawk: Any intent to amalgamate these project reports? We used to produce an annual report. danjared: SIPBv6 project is getting useful use. Created a tunnel for the One Laptop Per Child project so they can do testing. jhawk: How many tunnels do we have? danjared: Half a dozen. wdaher: I’m exchanging emails with a guy in Germany trying to get an RFID reader. Publications Report: tabbott: We were out of iMatlab last week. Did anyone do anything about that? (Are people familiar with what you do when we’re out of a publication?) mitchb: I’ll deal with it. CokeComm Report: tabbott: Seem to be okay. Orientation Report: tabbott: CPW is two months away. If you want to have some cool demo on our table, now is the time to work on it. nelhage: Athena Defcon sign! IAP Report: Other: jhawk: I discovered that the pocket in my gloves is perfect for holding Charlie cards such that I can punch the card reader. tabbott: I was admitted to graduate school at MIT, so you may not have seen the last of me six months from now. mitchb: Seems like you gained some of your vice right there. Other Other: '() Other Other Other: jbarnold: If there were to be nothing in today’s Other Other report, it would be the first time in two years. mitchb: I think we should implement a new rule that we should always have something in Other Other Other. quentin: Britney Spears shaved her head. jhawk: Not irrelevant enough! The meeting was adjourned at 20:39. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.