Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 09/19/2005 The meeting was called to order at 19:30.[*] by jbarnold. [* indicates 2 significant figures on the seconds, only.] In attendance were Voting members: golem jbarnold | jhawk Associate members: rax, jtu, asedeno, wjh, kchen, gschmidt, xela, rls, opus | ocschwar Prospectives: mshaw, yoz, lizsmith, rram, tabbott, astronut, presbrey, neboat, yuhsin, jwalden | tilia Guests: Chairman's Report: jtu: Nominate astronut for membership. 7-0-0. Membership elections for yoz and tabbott. yoz: I'm Yoyo, my username is yoz, I've been a prospective for a bit over 2 years now, and I'm a junior, things that I've done have included being one of the SIPB tours suckers this year, and doing most of the publicity work for that, as well as some of the contacting people, and also incidentally, I am the only current maintainer of cluster-maps I think. tabbott: I'm Tim, username tabbott, afs uid 63370, I've been a prospective in SIPB for the last 18 months, I've been involved with some of the work on scripts (openafs modules), mild modifications to the documentation, helping finds bugs, and things like that. I've been involved with SIPB computer tours, I was the other [tours] sucker this year, and I did more of the contacting people and less of the publicity and some stuff like that. I also have helped out at all of the SIPB activities midways since I became involved with SIPB, and helped convince freshmen that they want to hang out here and stuff like that. jbarnold: Open the floor to questions: rax: Why do you know your UID? tabbott: I've played with AFS a lot. jbarnold: The scripts server will teach you your UID very quickly. rax: good answers. jbarnold: (to rax) I'd rather not call on the same person twice in a row. jtu: Would you sing and dance for us? tabbott/yoz: No/No. jbarnold: Even if the answer was yes, you don't actually have to dance, because that wasn't the question. rax: My question was flippant. jtu: Wait, you mean I asked a flippant question so you could have the chance to ask another flippant question and now you won't? rax: Why don't you know your uid? yoz: I do, its 62318. xela: What's my UID? yoz: I think I've seen it on your shirt. jbarnold: What is it? jhawk: 17073 xela: Why do you know that? jhawk: I looked it up. rram: How do you look it up? jbarnold: ls -l the person's home directory jhawk: pts examine is generally the best way. xela: I'm going to ask one of the traditional questions. Each of you, pick someone in a room, ask them a question that they don't know the answer to that you do. Preferably computer-related. yoz: Jeff, in postscript, what is the effect of the sign on the last argument to roll? jbarnold: Determines whether you're rolling forward or backward? yoz: Is positive forward or backward? jbarnold: Positive is backward. Because positive forward would be too obvious. Any other questions? yoz: How many arguments does curve take? jbarnold: FOUR! yoz: No. jbarnold: Darn my luck has run out. yoz: Six. tabbott: For which integers n is there a function in the openafs source in 1.32.79, afs_random_mod_n()? [Ed.: This was actually 1..3.79, afs_randomModn()] kchen: Hmm. I would say 13 and 17. tabbott: 15 and 127. kchen: Oh right, the 15 I remember discussing with you. The 127 I don't remember. jtu: Pick someone in this room that you don't know, give them a username, and a story about how they chose that username. jhawk: Traditionally it's a name. yoz [to rram]: Your username is testuser. And you picked it because you thought it would be a cool username. jhawk: testuser is, of course, assigned to Joe Testuser, in case you didn't know, and it is used by the network operations group. tabbott [to austein]: I think you're going to be the victim... [jtu: austein makes frightened faces] jtu: It has to have a happy ending. tabbott: "big2", because 2+2 is 5 for large values of 2, as is on your t-shirt. rram: I'm Ricky. austein: I'm Matt Goldstein, I'm a freshman, username [pronounces:] A U Stein [austein]. golem: Serious question. A user comes into the office and has a computer question and you're the only one who has the answer. What's the question and what's the answer? yoz: A user accidently used inc to inc all their mail, and they want to send it back to pine using pine. jtu [interrupting]: redistmail! yoz: Answering using pine: Go to setup, enable aggregate commands, rename INBOX so pine doesn't treat it specially, select all, save to your mailbox, which you do with ; A and then A, S. Pine ignores case. tabbott: To some extent that depends on who is in the office, but from past experience, it is typically how to get openafs working on something or some question related to that, like how to make their home workstation able to access athena effectively. jtu: Two questions. One for each. Tim, you get to choose first whether you want the question. A user walks into the office, you're the only one into the office, they ask a question you don't know the answer to. What do you do? Do you want this question? tabbott: Sure. I'd probably send a zephyr to class sipb if it's not in google or something. jtu [imperious]: It's 5am and everyone is asleep. tabbott: I might send them to OLC in the morning. jtu: It's unsupported and the only page you find on google is in japanese and there's no translation, and the translation that comes out says something about horses' asses and monkeys. tabbott: Given that that's what I get on google, maybe i'll tell them that I can't help them. jtu: You can always have them send email to sipb@mit.edu. jtu: Yoyo, your question is: a user walks into the office from the cluster, says there's water falling out of the ceiling in that side room. You walk over and see it is the machine room. There's water coming out of the sprinkler heads. What do you do? yoz: You can call FIXIT. And possibly also page ops and tell that that they should hurry over to the W20 machine room. jhawk: So, you probably want to talk to CAC first, because they can get ahold of Facilities faster than you can. If you do pickup the phone, you should call 3-1500 instead of FIXIT, to bypass the phone tree. And you should call DOST, who are the people in IS&T who are not ops but who manage the machine room, and let them know, and their phone number is 37049 and is posted on the door as well as in who_fixes_what. And you might also zephyr about it if you actually had a moment. jbarnold: Kind of like these one-man shows on broadway. jtu: Before you can do any of that, the power to the building is cut. jhawk: Does that include the power to our phones which normally doesn't fail until 30 minutes into a power outage? jtu: Yes. You touch the phones and your fingers tingle. gschmidt: What's your favorite programming language and *WHY*? yoz: That's somewhat of a difficult question, I tend to take an impartial view of programming language. For most simple tasks I think I tend to use perl, just because its a little bit too flexible and a little bit too powerful and it's the one tool I would rely on if I had nothing else. tabbott: I also tend to write short scripts in perl, and for larger programs it would depend on what actually I'm doing. gschmidt: Examples of strengths and weaknesses of choices? tabbott: C has lots of fun memory things you can screw up, but it's a lot faster for computation than a scripting language like perl. Things like java have a slowness issue, I don't really want to talk forever about this. jbarnold [with others]: In the interest of my curiosity, I'd like to do this interactively. Who feels these are their favorite languages: [ show of hands] C ~2 C++ Lisp ~1 Java perl ~4 python %4 ruby scheme fortran pascal forth 1 assembler haskell php ML, Chef rram: If you're compiling an MIT fact of the day, what would be your fact? yoz: I think I was collecting some sort of things like this before. My fact of the day might be umm, there's this interesting discuss meeting called lore on menelaus and it has some interesting lore. tabbott: What lore does it have? yoz: It's really old. tabbott: MIT's project athena was started in 1983. jhawk: What are SIPB's top 3 most important and effective ways to communicate with the MIT community? Alternate. tabbott: One of the things that is attempted to be constructed on stuff.mit.edu, as a home page for MIT students in general. yoz: Something SIPB could definitely use to communicate to students and other people is the AskSIPB article in The Tech. tabbott: Something that would probably only be effective for a subset, would be the first year summer mailing. We could put useful information in there. We could educate them in there. yoz: I know in the past that SIPB has sponsored some sort of town hall meetings where students get together to discuss some sort of important computing issue. tabbott: We also have this space up here [points to window, sipb whiteboard] that all that many people don't look at when passing by to the cluster, but sometimes it does have communications about things. I don't actually think it's a large factor. jtu: Ask each other a traditional question that has not yet been asked and answer it. tabbott: [procedural] yoz: What would you do if the SIPB office was to catch on fire? tabbott: Well, clearly I should grab the save in case of fire tray [sic] and run away with it without informing anyone! I think I'd try to inform people of what's going on. jtu: You should close the door as you exit and pull the fire alarm. jbarnold: Or find Erin and get her to summon a flood. tabbott: Who was {jbarnold} before {jbarnold} was {jbarnold}? [Ed.: {jbarnold} is pronounced "jarnold".] yoz: Before {jbarnold}, jtu. Before jtu, golem. Before golem, tibbetts. Before tibbetts, fyfer. Before fyfer, nathanw, I think. gschmidt: So you're alone in the office with another member. I have this machine with a great uptime, unfortunately it is plugged in to outlet A, I would like it to be plugged into outlet C. Fortunately it's plugged into output A via a UPS, I plan to take this extension cord, splice another plug onto extension cord, plug it into the UPS, and execute a complicated maneuver. What do you do? jhawk: You had a fatal error. yoz: I tell jhawk not to do it. tabbott: I agree. jhawk: Correct answer is you unplug the UPS and plug it into outlet B. rax: You both waffled on your favorite language, which is fair. More interestingly, if a user comes in who has never programmed computers before and wants to write a program, what kind of language would you recommend for what kind of tasks. yoz: If they've never programmed before, I don't think they would start with kernel hacking, but if so I would recommend C. For other things that require optimization, I would recommend C or C++. If they mostly want to run simulations, I might suggest one of the various math toolkits, Mathetmatica or Matlab or whatever. For most other things I would say perl. rax: How would you got about encouraging them to learn these languages with a special focus on perl? yoz: I would encourage them to look at lots of examples, read documentation, and write small test programs whenever they're confused, because that's what I'd do myself. tabbott: If it's possible that if their task didn't involve any string processing tasks, I might have them use C. jbarnold: I remind folks that after the closed portion of the meeting, we'll have the elections for secretary. jtu: How would you solve the problem of having too many chairs? yoz: I would keep the office cleaner so people wouldn't object to sitting on the floor. tabbott: It seems like there's space back here where you could have more chairs where people could see. This stuff under the desk here should go away and that would make thing easier. rax: What are you feelings on folding chairs? yoz: I think they might be what the SIPB needs for those first few weeks of term. For emergency deployments. tabbott: As a permanent fixture, they're annoying. A lot of times people have to walk through the [...] gauntlet. xela: For any number greater than about five, stacking chairs consume less space (when not in use) than folding chairs. jhawk: Folding or stacking chairs [rax?]: What is your HASS concentration and what did you pick? yoz: I don't think I actually have one. The most likely is Comparative Media Studies, but that is only because I have two classes that might fall under it. I have no idea if they actually fulfill the requirement. gschmidt: What are the classes? yoz: Film Experience, and Technologies of the Word. tabbott: Economics, it's mainly because I'm lazy and when I choose a HASS I don't want to write a lot of papers, and Economics doesn't require me to. golem: We're in the 21st century. In order to continue being a positive effect on the world, SIPB needs to _______. Fill in the blank. yoz: SIPB needs to advocate for student computing around campus, it can do this through a variety of means, like through ISTAB. For example, one issue that is coming up is more is that students bring computers to campus. They have a limited number of drops they get in their rooms, and why are they not allowed to use anything other than AUI to connect more than one? tabbott: To encourage MIT students to carry out interesting projects with computers. It's often true that people at MIT get distracted by things that seem to matter like classes and grades, but you often learn much more doing projects that interest you, rather than short exercises assigned by your classes. jtu: Hey Alex, Do you want to ask anything? [pause] xela: So, tell me, why do you want be a SIPB member? golem: I'm totally cruftier than you! jhawk: I'm cruftier than you! golem: True, but you're a freshman! [laughter] yoz: So I can have a key to the office and not feel less welcome in the office than I might; I'm not sure how exactly to phrase that. and so that I'm more comfortable using SIPB's resources to work on projects. tabbott: One part of it for me is that I'm tired of being kicked out of the office or forcing someone to stay in the office because I want to stay. And the sentiments about not feeling like wanting to use SIPB's resources when I'm not a member. It's also feels really weird when you're at a CPW midway and you're talking to people and you're not actually a member of the organization that you're advocating. jbarnold: Anyone else have anything ? [Closed meeting. ] tabbott: 8-0-0 yoz: 8-0-0 jbarnold: Congratulations tabbott, you are a member, and yoz you are member. You will get keys when I send mail and people after the meeting will do the appropriate afs and athena magic. jbarnold: Secretary elections. Indeed, you're member before the elections so you do get to vote in the elections. The secretary mostly takes minutes, but the constitution has more to say on the matters. The secretary takes records of all meetings, maintains necessary contact information of members, shall be charged with maintaining general office records and files, and shall keep records pertaining to the current active or inactive status of all members. The Secretary shall preside at meetings in the absence of all other officers. We take nominations and then we vote, and the voting occurs on paper and that's all the relevant details. jtu: I'd like to nominate Chris, tabbott, and yoz. jbarnold: OK. Do you accept? golem: No. tabbott: No. yoz: No. kchen: The only other person eligible is jhawk. jbarnold: OK, all members of the executive committee [procedural]... jhawk: Decline. tabbott: I nominate kchen? jtu: Move to postpone until this next week. kchen: In the meantime, perhaps we should ask the other active members if they want to run. jbarnold: We could also just eliminate the position. I'm not such a fan of the word-for-word minutes. rax: As someone who doesn't come to meetings but reads the minutes every week, I really enjoy watching my friends talk, whereas when it says "foley says stuff," it causes me to care less about the SIPB. golem: Dude, we could totally replace the minutes with a podcast. jbarnold: HIGH DEFINITION podcast. jtu: We could play HEAD ROULETTE where we put all of the head names in a hat, and draw a HEAD name out of the hat, and whomever is at that HEAD has to take minutes. jbarnold: At risk of being censured for the 3rd meeting in a row, I'm just going to say we'll do it next week. jtu: [jtu: something about how that's probably the correct interpretation and Jeff is in the clear] Treasurer's Report: '() Office Report: wjh: I picked up a new nVidia video card for milq that does rotation. I move $164 for the card (which is otherwise returnable). jtu seconds. jbarnold: I'm not so comfortable investing more in this machine that's nonstandard hardware. xela: It seems central to SIPB's mission to support Athena on non-standard hardware, doing it on the cheap. Having a machine or two around the office that we've put together from parts seems like a good way to further that. jbarnold: [milq is not an example of this, it was quite expensive.] 4-1-4 motion passes. jtu: Move to dispose of the cardboard box and its contents at my discretion or at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations and the 386 next to it. MSPWB. Office Cleaning Report: rls: There's a bag of vacuum bags labelled "for vax", if nobody has use for the bags inside the plastic, may I take them? I have a vax and have a hard time getting them. They only make them in England. jtu: second the motion. MSPWB. xela: For some unfathomable reason, the office remains not a pit after three weeks. jbarnold: I have been putting in hours keeping the office clean here and there. MIT Computing Report: [rram & jbarnold talked about MacGregor wireless, with some discussion about 15-20' separation between access points on some floors, and 100' separation on others]. rax: It's harder to steal Internet from MIT than it used to be. Someone offered me an IP address and I said not that hard (jtu). SIPB projects Report: jtu: $20 to reimburse Jeff for food from last week. jhawk: second White ballot. jtu/gschmidt: $200 for the term for snacks for specific project working time, mon. 5-7pm, if at least 3 prospectives and 2 members are working on projects. 5-0-4 passes yoz: I've been lame about AskSIPB. I hope to have something later tonight. If you'd like to work on AskSIPB, ask a SIPB member to add you to the list. jtu: I went to play music after the last meeting and looked for snork and I think I found it and rebooted it. xela: Perhaps a prospective project would be accurately labelling the machines. jbarnold: Would a Linux dialup be useful? jtu: It would be useful but asking for trouble. It seems like it's not useful to have a machine that you can't trust. jhawk: That seems not compelling to me. Security doesn't balance convenience here. People use Linux machines in clusters, and they are sufficiently secure. jbarnold: I think it's totally possible to secure Linux machines. jbarnold [walking around the office]: This is quiche-lorraine. Does anyone know what the status of this box is? [Walks around more...unintelligble.] jtu: What about snork? jbarnold: What is this machine, labelled turnip-twaddler? rax: I think it's the nethack server. jbarnold: I have a fundamental problem with everything that occurs in the meeting needing to be recorded. Immediately following the meeting I'm going to try to do a summary of the... kchen: This doesn't necessarily really need to happen during the meeting... jbarnold: If I can't find a person during a the meeting who knows what a machine is, I feel justified ripping it out. rax: Just to point out that some of those alums might have obligations at 7:30pm on Monday, and might be actively involved otherwise, and just because they're not a meeting doesn't mean they aren't actively involved. jbarnold: It would have been my first round of investigation for which machines can actually be terminated. Computer Services: '() Publications Report: '() Orientation Report: '() CokeComm Report: jbarnold: We're in a bad bad place with CokeComm. CokeComm is running down. IAP Report: mshaw: IAP is still requesting teachers. I yelled out at the last meeting and got about 10 responses. We usually have 20-25 classes. We need more. If interested, find me. mshaw@MIT. Yeah. xela: I believe in particular we don't have anyone offering to teach Python, C, C++, Java? mshaw: [Yes]. mshaw: We're always interested in more random and exciting classes. The lecture series is happening this year, that we have. jtu: I'm interested in a course aimed at people about to take 6.033, covering the more hands-on aspects. If you're interested in working on this with me, please let me know. kchen: I might be. mshaw: I'd like you request an allocation for IAP. mshaw: I'd like to [move] to allocate up to $1500 for this year's IAP expenses? We anticipate slightly higher expenses because we'll be running LSC slides through Oct/Nov, [and that adds up]. xela seconds. MSPWB. mshaw: Can someone add me to the reservations list for the ASA so I can reserve rooms? [kchen is dealing. ] Other: xela: I need to hire someone to help me do stuff around the house that's hard when you have a cane. You should be able to carry 40lbs up/down stairs, thought you won't do that more than 12 or 15 times. Roughly a days work. 6-10 hours. Willing to pay $12.50/hour. Or to barter 1.5 GHz xeon tower I no longer need, though that would involve some additional work. gschmidt: The mozilla codebase is actually pretty awesome. jhawk: Is that different from the firefox code base? gschmidt: Not really. ocschwar: According to the lm-sensors package, most of the computers where I work are currently on fire. mshaw: SIPB is getting too popular. I never find heads when I walk into this room. [ Frivolous comments. ] Other Other: rram: I'm officially staff at The Tech now. The meeting was adjourned at 20:49:09. Minutes taken and submitted by jhawk, commencing around 7:40pm.