Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-09-17 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk aseering ctl jbarnold jhawk jwalden mathmike nelhage presbrey tabbott wdaher yoz | keithw Associate members: asedeno | mitchb Prospectives: ecprice mclamb price ternus wangaj | seanyliu tvald Guests: Virgil Griffith Officer Reports: tabbott: We have a new treasurer, rayhe. He’s not here. MIT Computing Report: '() SIPB Projects Report: ternus: I’ve looked into the possibility of making a run of Debathena stickers. The research I’ve done indicates that it would probably be possible to make around 300 circular Debathena stickers for $100–$200. If we want the special die-cut variety, it would be considerably more. Should I keep looking into this? jhawk: Sounds kinda cool. You can probably get substantially better pricing. tabbott: Do people think we should have the die-cut stickers or a circular clear sticker? jbarnold: I think it depends totally on price. nelhage: I totally want a Debathena sticker. nelhage: We successfully made Linerva’s AFS cache more than 50 MB. Performance now doesn’t suck when you have two people accessing AFS. wangaj: I’ve been thinking about making a reuse web program, to give people instant updates on reuse from their browser. ternus: For reuse, often you can claim by showing up and grabbing it, or you can claim by emailing the person, and there is no meta-data on the email that tells you this. Not sure how you’d deal with that. It’s a cool idea. ternus: reuse isn’t publically archived. jhawk: Nasty policy reasons. Office Report: tabbott: We totally rearranged the office. [Explains with vigorous pointing.] There are two additional tables of Laptopland. Waseem wants to call them Laptopworld and Eurolaptop. jwalden: Laptop Kingdom? tabbott: Nobody has plugged in meadow and given it network yet. That should get done. tabbott: Here’s a pile of things we think the SIPB office no longer needs. This includes a bunch of junk, a deactivated hard drive, bart-savagewood, lola-granola, two of these coat hangers. tabbott: bart-savagewood isn’t our oldest Sun, but I’m not sure why someone put coleco-sidewinder in the rack. jhawk: It’s disappointing that there’s only one Sun login head. mclamb: For people that “like logging into Suns”, is that hardware or operating systems? Would you be happy logging into it if it were running on non-Sun hardware? jhawk: I’m not sure how to answer that. jbarnold: That’s a complex theology question. asedeno: I think danjared put coleco in the rack for IPv6 experimentation. We might want this one instead. jbarnold: I think we should get more chairs. Since we just got Aerons which are armrest chairs, we should get more Steelcase non-armrest chairs. I think getting one or two of these would be appropriate. They are about $700 each, maybe cheaper if we shop around. jbarnold: Also I think it would be good to replace the tables with drawers by tables without drawers so more people can fit around them. jbarnold: The last thing is that SIPB should consider getting another soft piece of furniture, like the couch but smaller. jhawk: If you eliminate one or two desks you eliminate five or ten drawers, and that could be a problem. jbarnold: We should garbage collect. Usable seats are more important. tabbott: Now that we have CokeComm storage on top of the filing cabinets, we don’t need a CokeComm drawer. Also a lot of the drawers are for people we haven’t seen in a long time. jbarnold: Also, we are not a historical archive. There are a lot of things we can get rid of. price: There are, for instance, yearbooks in there. yoz: Has the subject of folding chairs been discussed? tabbott: They’re not very comfortable. jbarnold: I think we should go ahead with the chairs at this meeting. Anyone willing to volunteer? mitchb: [enters] jbarnold: Hey, here’s the expert on chairs. mitchb: …as soon as I get paid for the last one… mitchb: Okay. tilia: We can get a mushroom chair! jbarnold: Move to allocate up to $1600 for two Steelcase chairs. mitchb: I promise I’m not going to intentionally throw more money at them. jhawk: What’s the status of the board’s funds? tilia: We have about $12000. jbarnold: Is that number adjusted for the fact that we aren’t spending for IP addresses this year? tilia: No, I haven’t done that. <11-0-2, motion passes> tabbott: We need to soon figure out what new tables we want to get. tabbott: There’s still this pile of junk to deal with. People should look through this after the meeting and see if there’s anything SIPB needs. jbarnold: Move for SIPB to rid itself of everything in that pile through the SIPB community, reuse. jhawk: I thought we discussed excluding bart-savagewood from that pile in favor of coleco-sidewinder. jbarnold: Does someone want to volunteer to deal with that issue? asedeno: I’ll talk to danjared. jbarnold: I exclude that machine from the motion. ternus: It would be nice if the SIPB office had a Natural keyboard. tabbott: We have no extra USB keyboards; it would be good to get more. ternus: If you’d like, I will order keyboards from Newegg. ternus: Move to allocate $44.09 for a USB keyboard and a USB Natural keyboard. jbarnold: We should do something about Kerberos’ pedestal, which was actually intended to be a mount for the projector. The problem was that we failed to account for the optics of the situation; in particular, as the projector gets further away from the screen, the image gets larger. We should find another place to mount the projector (on the ceiling?), or get a bigger screen. jhawk: Can’t you get a replacement lens? jbarnold: That’s also a possibility. It would be great if someone would volunteer to deal in one of these ways. mitchb: Didn’t we want it to be not permanently mounted to the ceiling? dbates01: I will volunteer. asedeno: I talked to danjared over Zephyr. coleco-sidewinder has no current state. tabbott: Okay, so we can add it to the reuse pile. keithw: I want to play with an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive. Move to allocate up to $500 to buy one of these at my discretion. jbarnold: I will remind people that keithw has done several SIPB projects before in this space including some Perl shenanigans involving DVDs a few years ago, and some Sportcast things, and LAMP. It’s not a totally out-of-the-blue allocation. tabbott: Our LAMP TV now has the LAMP screen burned in to it. jbarnold: Years from now, people will say “You can’t get rid of that TV! It has the LAMP screen burned into it!” jhawk: You are free to move that it is the sense of the SIPB that as soon as the TV is no longer usable, the screen should be cut off and mounted on the wall. keithw: Won’t we all die? Aren’t the phosphors radioactive? <11-0-4, motion passes> jwalden: I’m not going to say anything about yesterday since I have a conflict of interest, but kudos to the people that thought up the idea and made the office cleaning party happen. Education Report: price: Cluedumps! There’s a cluedump in 1-190 in half an hour. Our Chairman will talk about AFS. We will skip next week because people will be absent for the CSAIL student workshop. The following week will be keithw speaking on the law. tabbott: There’s additional documentation work being done by kaduk on iZephyr. keithw: I think geofft’s doing a great job with the Ask SIPB column. The snide comments of some on Zephyr are unjustified. Other: jhawk: My unenthusiastic appeal for the Stellar advisory committee gathered two interested parties, so I should appeal less unenthusiastically. jbarnold: If you want to serve on the committee, talk to jhawk. price: The Harvard Computer Society will have a Fall barbecue on Saturday the 29th. keithw: Is it going to be black tie like last year’s, or just semi-formal? price: Have you been to the barbecue? keithw: No. price: For the record, attire that’s appropriate for the SIPB office would be quite normal at the barbecue. tabbott: HCS is better than SIPB at hosting barbecues. keithw: I think that jtu did an excellent job with the SIPB barbecue in 2004, and the snide comments of some are unjustified. jbarnold: It’s my recollection that SIPB people actually did much of the fire-starting and fire-tending. yoz: I learned that the Media Lab runs an Ubuntu mirror at ubuntu.media.mit.edu. Other Other: jhawk: I have $2 bills. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 20:10. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.