Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-11-26 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk arolfe aseering belmonte ctl jbarnold jhawk jwalden nelhage tabbott Associate members: mitchb Prospectives: dvp jesstess kaduk price Guests: Officer Reports: '() MIT Computing Report: jhawk: mailman got hosed on Thanksgiving day. Messages going to mailman were delayed 11–20 hours. The backlog got cleared on Friday. Other parts of the mail system have been more dodgy lately. tabbott: Apparently Athena 10 is going to be based on Ubuntu Hardy, the next LTS Ubuntu release. jwalden: Hampster? andersk: Heron. tabbott: They seem to be planning to use some Debathena work; how much is unclear. arolfe: Are they planning to do anything substantially different from Debathena? tabbott: For example, they’re dropping amd64, Debian, and all non-LTS Ubuntu releases. Also they have some public cluster modifications, and some GNOME hacks. SIPB Projects Report: andersk: Linerva only crashed once this week. nelhage: We now have epsilon worth of debugging information. tabbott: We initially suspected AFS, but now suspect grsecurity may be involved. jbarnold: We are going to get to the bottom of this problem before the uplink release so we can declare that Linerva will never reboot. This problem will go away as t approaches finite value. Office Report: tabbott: quentin set up a debathena user with null password on the Mac, which is running a Debathena VM so you can use Debathena on it instead of the Mac. He may set up something similar for Vista depending on how people find the experience. aseering: Out of curiosity, would people use a standard Athena VM? nelhage: Athena is dead. dvp: Long live Athena. aseering: snork apparently wasn’t working because someone booted it into an Ubuntu live CD. This makes it not work. Please send email. tabbott: I do recall quentin was trying to get xvolume onto the same machine as sipb-mp3. quentin: [later] I definitely did not do anything to snork. Education Report: dvp: Go to stuff.mit.edu/iap, you’ll see what we’re currently offering and what we still need to offer. We sent out the room assignments. We need someone to teach Caffienated Crash Course in C++. geofft will teach programming in C, he just doesn’t know it yet. We need someone to teach Java. tabbott: 6.370 and Maslab want people to know Java. dvp: We also need Python shell scripting. tabbott: Clearly we should merge SIPB Education Report with SIPB Projects Report. price: There’s a cluedump tonight. Dennis Baron, Senior Strategist for Integrated Communications at IS&T, will talk about voice over IP. There is a SIPB project to make a scripts-like service for VoIP; if you have any interest in that, this would be an excellent opportunity to learn about VoIP. tabbott: dheera has been thinking about setting up a system using that service to allow people to set wakeup calls. You could easily do wakeup calls for several hundred people from one machine with VoIP. jbarnold: We have enough computing power to wake up all of campus in the middle of the night! price: Next week, Scott Aaronson, a professor who just arrived this year, will talk about quantum computing: “Computational Intractibility as a Law of Physics.” price: That’s probably the last cluedump of the term. tabbott: We should think about whether we should continue the series into the spring or IAP. price: We have one or two topics we’ll definitely do in the spring. We might have a full-blown series; we might have a few isolated talks. tabbott: An Ask SIPB column got submitted on SVN. tabbott: I learned over the weekend that Athena still does not install default bash configuration files to new user accounts. jhawk: There are some in /usr/prototype_user. tabbott: You have to copy them manually. jhawk: Is that a bug? tabbott: Probably. I also don’t understand why the default shell on Athena is tcsh. Other: price: MIT Free Culture has a project now which resembles in some characteristics SIPB projects. We are examining videos taken down from Youtube and perhaps other sites due to copyright allegations, to see how many we can find that are being taken down that shouldn’t be. We’re using SIPB infrastructure for this. jhawk: I decided to ask why my tickets in the network queue are going untouched for months. The answer was don’t send email to network, send email to computing-help. belmonte: That’s interesting, because I replied to a six-month-old network ticket a few days ago; that seemed to go into a black hole too. jhawk: On the other hand, this weekend, I decided to open tickets in both queues, and the network ticket was responded to. It still leaves me uncertain what to do, other than always open both tickets until someone yells at me for that. Other Other: '() Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 19:49. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.