Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 06/20/2005 The meeting was called to order at 7:30 by kchen. In attendance were Voting members: kchen rayhe keithw janetryu | jtu arolfe Associate members: jhawk deberg asedeno ocschwar Prospectives: tabbott | jonas Guests: Treasurer's Report: Chairman's Report: Office Report: deberg: So, we have this rack. Some things got moved out. The old 386 and accompanying ROM burner are gone; the goal is to leave them around for the summer, and get rid of them in the fall if nobody wants it. deberg: bill-the-cat, a SPARC5 running athena, is now gone. deberg: I move to dispose of it at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations. arolfe: second white ballot, motion passes deberg: I also move to dispose of the monitor previously attached to the rack, at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations. deberg: I swapped in an LCD from the floor that wasn't doing anything. jhawk: Are you sure it works with all the machines on the rack? deberg: There were some machines that don't show up on the console, but that seemed expected. arolfe: second white ballot, motion passes deberg: hodge was on the floor, and got moved into the rack. kcr moved anxiety-closet into the machine room, and sent mail to the effect of its being a dying machine and that people should get their stuff off of it. deberg: The monitor was sitting on the old milquetoast, which is an ancient mac. I move to dispose of the old milquetoast as well, at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations. arolfe: second white ballot; motion passes. arolfe: The Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations told me to tell people to tell him if you want anything in the auction pile. deberg: We now have two office macs. Should we move the new one somewhere else? rayhe: There's a weird bug in the new mac, in that if you drag a lot of files to the burner, you end up with all the right filenames, but they're all copies of the first file in the list. So, we should keep the old mac around. jhawk: We should keep them both, but it'd be too crowded to have them both where they are now. deberg: I want to keep both as well, but one needs to go somewhere proper. Is anyone willing to sacrifice an Athena head for another mac? arolfe: We could get rid of the second head on the Windows machine, perhaps. deberg: I think this discussion petered out; we'll not do anything about it. rayhe: At the very least, it'd be better than pickled-herring on the monolith... deberg: We probably want it for normal people to use, so that's probably unwise. janetryu: I was thinking that perhaps it would be nice to get some sort of piece of furniture that could fit the printer on top, and have some sort of shelving, to replace the current table. This would give more shelf space there and make the couch easier to use. It would discourage piles of stuff growing under and on the table. The goal would be to not have space above and below it, to avoid clutter. kchen: Wouldn't that be a decrease in utility? rayhe: Can we allocate more space in the office? Office Cleaning Report: jhawk: During that mac discussion, Lou announced that now yet another group of people will be taking care of the maintanance of Athena printers. This guy rmonihan will be doing this as his job, and people should contact him rather than hotline about printer problems. MIT Computing Report: Computer Services: jhawk: I hit anxiety closet with a hammer and then it stopped working. arolfe: That was stupid. keithw: IS&T is supporting the Sportcast project with about $60000 of FY2005 money. This is to support a free software high-definition TV production project. We have no ongoing budget; all of our money expired in June. We'd like SIPB to support the ongoing costs financially; I'd like a straw poll on allocating $5000 for it in FY2006. arolfe: Our budget is around $10000-$15000 once you take out the stuff like phone service and our IP addresses. deberg: I like cool flagship projects, would rather spend money on this than a couple of machines. arolfe: What do you expect that the money would get spent on? keithw: It's not clear; we tried to order everything we need in FY2005, but there will be things we forgot. keithw: I expect to need things like cabling, hardware, and everything else we forgot to get before. arolfe: Who at I/S had $60k to get rid of? keithw: ResTech. deberg: When would we have to decide this for real? I guess we could piecemeal allocate your needs as they come. arolfe: It'd be cool if we could get the UA to support it. keithw: The hope is to have a demo at the SIPB booth at the Activities Midway this fall. arolfe: Are we planning to use this technology only for sports events? keithw: MIT currently has no high-definition capability, so this could be useful to all sorts of groups. someone: Graduation, perhaps? someone: The SIPB meeting! keithw: We'd want to do something, but we'd need to be careful about giving $60k in equipment to random student groups without supervision. jtu: What prevents this from leaving other organizations to believe that they can get SIPB to fund things for them? keithw: This is a SIPB project, and we're asking for SIPB support, and will be giving SIPB credit. jtu: How so? keithw: Well, it's my project, and I choose to credit SIPB. We've advertised a great deal looking for people to work on the project within SIPB, as well. asedeno: It is information processing, after all. rayhe: Will there ever be a jumbotron, where you can zoom in on the important events? keithw: Well, there are 4 people in the office working on the project. jtu: Well, there are also many people working on LSC projects, and we'd not call that a SIPB project. arolfe: Is it worth $5k of SIPB's money? janetryu: Similar to LAMP, it'd be a project in conjuction with SIPB and other involved groups, and be advertised as such. Straw poll: 5.5-0-3.5 jtu: The new stuff.mit.edu has been set up. You should contact me or astronut if you're interested in helping. The two of us have been spending a lot of work on the project, and so we'd appreciate it if you talked to us before going and implenting something for the website, so that no work gets wasted. keithw: Have you thought of having a webcam on the webpage, that shows like, what's on the dome right now? jtu: Wouldn't something like an Anna's cam work better? asedeno: The camera on the dome would make things difficult for hackers. keithw: I just think it'd be cool to have a cool changing picture on the webpage. jtu: The art department at national sportswear finally figured out how to spell Student without the "b", so I gave them approval. They're planning to deliver the shirts on the 24th or so; I'll be out of town then, so in W91 will take care of the financial issues. jtu: The shirts will live in the SIPB office for a while; I want to have a note on the box telling people to not take them until the shirts are labeled; I'll work on it when I get back in July. This prevents anyone from taking someone else's shirt due to poor recollections as to what they actually ordered. janetryu: I sent mail to sipb-office about having office hours or classes or something. I got a few responses from people saying they'd be happy to lead classes. It's not clear whether we should start this this summer, but perhaps we should have a class. arolfe: I think the programming office hours is a really good idea. It'd a good way to sucker people into hanging out in the SIPB office, and get them to join SIPB. jhawk: We could have it Monday at 8PM. arolfe: Someone suggested Wednesdays, but we could do Mondays at 6 or 8. kchen: What'd happen at these events? arolfe: The SIPB office would be open with people doing work here; the idea would be that it would be a good time to come in and work on programming projects. janetryu: I think it should be something where you can assume that people will be there, and be helpful, and once it's established it can move on from there to having more assumptions. arolfe: You'd get a lot of grad students who are too lazy to program and want us to do it for them. arolfe: I think Wednesday would be a better choice. janetryu: So, we think office hours Wednesday evening sounds like a good idea? jhawk: [calls straw poll] Straw Poll: Monday: 1, Wednesday: 4. janetryu: These would be advertised as come to the SIPB office, bring your work, someone might help you. kchen: Will you organize making sure the office will be open? janetryu: Yeah, I'll take care of doing that, and setting up publicity. It'll probably start in a few weeks once publicity is done. Publications Report: kchen: I think we ran out of emacs reference cards last week. Did someone deal with that? jtu: I sent mail, and they hadn't seen one, but I gave them ours to make more. kchen: I think the 6.001 website has a link to a copy of it as well. Orientation Report: tabbott: If you have ideas for cool places at CSAIL or otherwise that SIPB Computer Tours should visit in the fall, email yoz or myself. keithw: RMS's office. Make sure he'll be there when you visit. tabbott: I'll send mail requesting suggestions as well. IAP Report: jhawk: Do we have a sucker yet? kchen: I don't think we have one yet. Do we usually have one this early? jhawk: Yes. kchen: Is anyone interested in doing this? Maybe someone should explain what the job entails. jhawk: You organize the classes, schedule them, do room reservations, find the speakers. rayhe: Is there documentation? someone: yes, there's some in AFS. janetryu: I think it was alien and natan last year. kchen: If you think you might be interested, talk to natan and alien about it. I think jtu has also done it in the past; they can give you an idea as to what is involved. CokeComm Report: Other: keithw: Today I opened a bank account for my nonprofit unincorporated association, and Bank of America sent me a 2-page pdf with my account information on page 1, and some other company's on page 2. It's got their visa card number. I hope they didn't get my account information. kchen: Is this the group for your house? keithw: Yes. Other Other: keithw: On August 31, 1999, Richard Guy died. Last Wednesday, his parents dropped their lawsuit against MIT. oschawar: Any concessions disclosed? keithw: No. The meeting was adjourned at 8:03 PM. Minutes taken and submitted by tabbott.