“I direct people to getafirstlife.com.” —jwalden Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-02-26 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk, aseering, jbarnold, jemorris, jhawk, nelhage, tabbott, tilia, quentin, wdaher, xsdg Associate members: asedeno, hartmans, mitchb, srz Prospectives: geofft, jwalden, mathmike, sakhan Guests: Report of the Treasurer: tilia: I have numbers this week, but they’re not very good. We have about $12,000 left to spend in the rest of this fiscal year. hartmans: Fuck, we should start spending then. tabbott: Does that include the sketchy fund? jhawk: No, it does not. mathmike: When does the fiscal year end? hartmans: Basically, you need to have things arrive by the beginning of June. mitchb: Reimbursements from last term? jhawk: Assigned check numbers and presumably checks are en route. mitchb: Regarding the machine room budget going away, do we have confidence that the office budget will continue to be replenished? hartmans: It doesn’t matter, it goes away at the end of the year anyway. hartmans: The treasurer should be able to find out whether the budget request was approved. Report of the Chairman: tabbott: We have an election for geofft. geofft: I’m geofft, a freshman. I started showing up at SIPB in the Fall. I’ve answered scripts email, been active in -c sipb, been in the office and helped users. hartmans: You’ve proposed various ideas that some people have disagreed with. Which of these do you think are good ideas and which are bad? geofft: I suggested that the print jobs should all go to one queue that’s distributed to printers as available. I still think that’s a good idea. Most people don’t know how to switch printers, or don’t want to check which ones are available. geofft: We should have a SIPB Facebook group. (Not sure whether this is still a good idea.) jhawk: User comes into the office with something to scan/OCR. What do you recommend? geofft: Use the Mac. jhawk: Are you happy with this? geofft: Yes. jhawk: I’m not happy with the UI. Can’t scan from Photoshop. quentin: If you’re membered, will you still put up with arn? geofft: Yes. jbarnold: Name three ways in which SIPB could be better. geofft: We can make our vast body of knowledge more accessible to users. Update documentation, host new documentation on some kind of clue wiki. It’s almost impossible to find something in the collective knowledge of SIPB unless you look hard and repeatedly bother people. geofft: We should advertise ourselves more to the MIT community so they know who we are and what we’re willing to help with. geofft: We should get more people in SIPB because there are plenty of people who would be great fits if they knew about us. nelhage: What’s so scary about SIPB? How should we improve this? geofft: I’m not entirely sure. It might help to get more people to know who SIPB is. jwalden: How do you propose making users who want help know about this wiki? geofft: We should put an Ask SIPB column in the Tech. We should get IS&T put this information in cards for new students. We should put signs on campus. quentin: You’ve done a lot of things with Mac-Athena. What is Mac-Athena missing and what will you work on? geofft: Locker software, which is admittedly a hard problem to solve. One of the benefits of Athena, apart from the ability to use MIT services, is the amount of software available; this doesn’t exist on Mac-Athena. Talked to alexp a little bit about this. wdaher: It’s Friday, you’re at LSC, bum-bedum-bum…“Friday and Sunday”…which Sunday does that refer to? (Two days from now or a week and two days from now?) wdaher: Now you see one that says Saturday and Sunday? geofft: You know, I’ve never been to LSC, so I have no idea. wdaher: Will you set up something on the Mac that reads Zephyrs from -c sipb -i office out loud? geofft: Depends on the circumstances. wdaher: If SIPB were a voice in Mac OS, which voice would it be? geofft: It’s a tossup between Fred and Deranged. jemorris: Consider the minimum possible scariness of SIPB. How does it compare to typical student groups? geofft: SIPB isn’t a typical student group. Say, the Shakespeare Ensemble wouldn’t want random people walking in and asking Shakespeare questions. jemorris: What do you think the minimum plausible scariness of SIPB? geofft: 1 in the appropriate units? geofft: I think the word “scary” is used in two ways. (1) You guys are weird, I’m leaving. (2) That’s really impressive, how did you do that? You are a god. Sense (2) is crucial to SIPB and (1) is not. If we can get rid of sense (1) I think there is no need to get rid of sense (2). hartmans: One common thing that happens when people make transitions into organizations is that they choose a name, but you have a problem. There are too many Jeffs. What should we call you? geofft: Getting rid of the rest of the Jeffs isn’t an option? hartmans: Okay, you take on Jeff Schiller and let us know when you’re done. geofft: I could be Geoffrey or geofft. hartmans: What should IS&T do to the Mac platform to improve its utility for student computing? geofft: It depends on whether IS&T thinks Athena should be continued or is dying. If Athena is a good service, there should be a shiny installer for AFS/Kerberos (with all Athena services), and locker software. Possibly make it so you can manage lockers that doesn’t involve the terminal, have a way to browse the software in some sort of tree, etc. jhawk: Suppose you’re trying to use wireless in a classroom and find that it doesn’t work. What do you do? geofft: Do I know that wireless had been working elsewhere? jhawk: Yes. geofft: Turn off and on the wireless card of my laptop. jhawk: Still doesn’t work. geofft: See what sort of IP settings I get. jhawk: No IP address. But your client is correctly configured. geofft: Change seats, or not worry about it and pay attention to the class. jhawk: Interesting. Okay. geofft: In 32-123 I have been able to see the APs and not been able to associate. jhawk: I wanted to know how you’d report the problem. I tried to report the problem and did it wrong. I don’t really know what the answer is. jhawk: If you have line-of-sight to an AP, it should function. Otherwise, something is broken. hartmans: I’m not sure I agree. geofft: There may be enough random radio activity to interfere with wireless. tabbott: who_fixes_what. hartmans: Can we get someone sufficiently crufty to ask The Question? geofft: You don’t feel crufty enough? hartmans: [points at srz] Not when he’s in the room! jbarnold: Who was tabbott before jbarnold was tabbott? geofft: I think it’s jbarnold, but I’m not sure which tabbott was which tabbott and which jbarnold was which jbarnold. jbarnold: Keep going. geofft: ctl, mitchb: That’s not a username! geofft: golem, fyfer, there was a jhudson [sic] at some point. jbarnold: Never mind. srz: geofft, why do you want to become a SIPB member? geofft: Because I believe that God has given me the gift of knowing things about computers, and SIPB is the most effective means to share this gift. Being a member will let me keep the office open, answer users and phone calls, dink around with office heads when necessary. <11-1-0, geofft elected> tabbott: I have renamed the “Chairman’s Report” and the “Treasurer’s Report” to “Report of the Chairman” and “Report of the Treasurer” to thwart andersk’s UTF-8 apostrophes. andersk: Motion to censure the chair and restore their former names. hartmans: Tim should have the authority to make a fool of himself. jemorris: 1, Tim should decide it. 2, Tim should not do it. jhawk: Move to divide the question. <6-5-3, motion passes> tabbott: The first question is censuring me for renaming the report. <3-8-3, motion fails> hartmans: On re-renaming the reports. I think that this is a really bad precedent. We shouldn’t waste time. It’s inappropriate to pass a motion one way or the other. (We should have the authority to do so, but we should not exercise it.) <3-8-4, motion fails> tabbott: Prospectives should be able to vote on issues like this and have their opinion expressed. hartmans: I assume that at special called meetings, that’s not the case. I assume also that the EC would override if they felt necessary. tabbott: Correct. jhawk: Discrimination between prospectives? tabbott: The drafted policy has not been circulated widely. hartmans: You’re planning on getting these passed by the board, right? tabbott: rjbarbal has pointed out that the constitution authorizes me to do this. jemorris: rjbarbal is full of shit. hartmans: I agree (maybe not as strongly). jhawk: I agree. The constitution is at best ambiguous on this point. tabbott: This was decided in a special meeting. mitchb: We should put this discussion on hold until we circulate the document. tabbott: Straw poll on whether it would be a good idea to let prospectives vote? quentin: Are we abandoning the idea of making it easier for prospectives to become members? tabbott: It’s useful because there’s no middle class between prospectives and permanent members. hartmans: This is important enough to have a formal proposal. tabbott: Why don’t we punt this discussion then. tabbott: To be clear, it is always true that non-members can make motions and express their opinions. MIT Computing Report: jhawk: outgoing failed today because someone sent too much email. tabbott: Seems like a good reason for it to fail. hartmans: IS&T wants to hire students for the summer. If you want to work on cool infrastructure projects, we can hire you. I have some ideas; if you have ideas, we can also do that. mitchb: There are continuing short outages relating to various servers moving from W92 to W91 (and E40). srz: Why are things moving? hartmans: NIST is taking over most of the W92 machine room, and is kicking server ops out. SIPB Projects Report: jbarnold: scripts now has a Linux Virtual Server (LVS) setup in testing. All traffic comes into two old Pentium IIIs, and is redirected to the main scripts and SQL servers. Any one machine can go down, and we get at most 5 seconds of down time. We’ve tested this and it works. tabbott: I think that we should have more hackathons, and it should be less annoying to schedule them. We should authorize some amount of money to be spent on hackathons announced at least two days in advance. To pick a random number, $75, to be spent at the discretion of the vice chair. jhawk: This would complicate the treasurer’s budgeting. hartmans: The treasurer and the vice chair should coordinate. nelhage: Move to white-ballot. [white ballot, motion passes] jbarnold: We’ll be getting a 48-port switch and one or two Dell servers to use for virtualization from NIST. Office Report: nelhage: We are out of plastic utensils in the SIPB food stuff drawer. tabbott: jhawk, are these office supplies? jhawk: Yes. tabbott: You should acquire some under your office supplies mandate. tabbott: We still have a busted chair. Is quentin going to deal with it? tabbott: The 6.002 class now has a textbook instead of course notes. jwalden: I have it. nelhage: I have an unopened copy. tabbott: Okay, so we don’t need to spend any money? jwalden: Would be nice to have about $20. jhawk: Motion to allocate $20 from the sketchy jhawk fund. [white ballot, motion passes] nelhage: Are supplies being acquired for the new whiteboard? hartmans: This is why you buy a real product. Office Cleaning Report: tabbott: We have a recycling bin that’s overflowing to almost twice its size. Publications Report: tabbott: Publications report? andersk: You’ve totally screwed up the order of the reports. In particular, you forgot MIT Computing Report. tabbott: We only have one copy of Using Discuss other than the office copy. hartmans: Do we care? nelhage: We have several copies in the back. mitchb: We have a lot of Matlab now. CokeComm Report: '() Orientation/IAP Report: nelhage: Both sooner than you think. nelhage: Any plans to finish the Defcon sign before CPW? quentin: Yeah. nelhage: People should work on it at the next hackathon, which will be soon. Other: jhawk: jbarnold forced me to register for a Wikipedia account and spend hours updating pages. jbarnold: Second Life is installed on the Mac. … jwalden: I direct people to getafirstlife.com. Other Other: xsdg: Road Rush is not fun. nelhage: Keith and Jeff evidently attempted to have sex but could not figure out how. mitchb: Do we need to create a Sketchy Couch Report for that? The meeting was adjourned at 20:41. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.