========================================================= NOTE: These are DRAFT minutes until this note is removed. ========================================================= Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2013-02-11 The meeting was called to order at by bbaren. In attendance were Voting members: achernya adehnert bbaren christy dennison dlaw dwilson ine phurst presbrey sqshemet Associate members: afarrell jbarnold quentin tlyu kaduk Prospectives: abost adat belzner btidor cereslee codetaku dove elefthei tboning vasilvv Guests: Administrivia: achernya: Some parts of the RPi order have arrived. Unfortunately, not the interesting part. I realized I forgot to order the SD cars, and I realized it doesn't make sense to get the Class 4s, and Want to allocate $15 to cover the thing I actually ordered. quentin: Within 10%, you're fine. glasgall: After jweiss chewing us out for the state of SMR, achernya and I cleaned us out. We found a Euro power cable, a null modem cable, and a CPU glued to a heatsink. achernya: There's also that 5-1/4" full-size hard drive in the floor. dwilson: IIRC, it's a full 80 megabytes. achernya: We also ordered rack screws for the racks. glasgall: The reason we started talking about is that sipb-office-escape-pod, an Athena workstation in SMR, is now Debathena and usable. kaduk: I do believe it's on W20 network, though, so power outages will still leave it out. adehnert: Per -c sipb a few weeks ago, /afs/sipb/admin/text/private/passwords now exists. Try not to run fsr in sipb/admin/text. We could also move it somewhere else. dwilson: The EC should update the Board on the most recent EC meeting. adehnert: It was thrilling. bbaren: The constitution has been amended, subject to approval of the UA. Article 3, section 4, has been replaced to clarify what it means to be active, especially if you were active to the start of a vacation. kaduk: There are other places in /afs/sipb that have private data like passwords for group accounts. adehnert and I will figure out something to do with them. ine: I believe I'm caught up on all the IAP receipts; one request, if you e-mail, please send them in electronic form, and e-mail sipb-treasurer@ rather than ine@. You should also drop something in the treasurers folder. glasgall: We also found $47 in an envelope labeled SIPB T-Shirt fund in SMR. kaduk: SIPB provies money to buy t-shirts, and we give one free t-shirt to every prospective or member. But if you think that the shirt is cool, and want another, you can buy another one, I think for $10. Because dealing with cash in MIT's accounting system is a pain, we have been putting it in the envelope. We could use it for small purchases or someone who made a small purchase, etc. SIPB Projects Report: dove: The git class was cancelled, not due to geofft, but I think it was wise to cancel it anyway. We should reschedule it. glasgall: The barnowl hackathon was cancelled for similar reasons. adehnert: It's like there was an act of God or something. achernya: We now have a SIPB VPN project. We're making a VPN for the management networks. We have it hooked up on the XVM backend. Sadly, we don't have enough switch ports much more, so I've sent an e-mail to network about it. christy: Sussman agreed for dinner; I'm waiting for a confirmation on what time exactly, but tentatively 2/21. I'll send it out to SIPB first so you can have extra time to sign up before anneh sends it out. bbaren: He has many stories about when things were less hardcore because we didn't have the hardware. Other: bbaren: We will be having a membership election for dove after the meeting. sqshemet: I went over to ask about the couch. They had no idea what I was talking about and said it was likely that it has since been re-somethinged. They said they hold things for two weeks. bbaren: So in other words, we're not getting a new couch. The couch working group should figure out what we're going to do that. adehnert: That's a thing? Do you have a mailing list? Other Other: phurst: There's a lot of snow outside. bbaren: We had winter storm Nemo. The T closed. quentin: The Weather Channel named it. afarrell: I would like to allocate $10 for a book called Difficult Conversations. dwilson: Second, I've read it and it's good. White ballot. [Motion passes.] Membership election for dove: bbaren: Justin, please tell the Board about yourself. dove: I'm a first-year grad student, Course 6, mainly EE, though my research is in quantum optics/computation. My background is physics and math, I did my underground in Long Island, and then I came here. I was a summer student of Scott Aaronsen's. While at SIPB, I organized this past IAP, and over the next few months am going to be reorganizing the IAP website. glasgall: What were the most/least pleasant parts of organizing IAP, and what do you want to do in the future? dove: The bad is having issues with room conflicts, like that one with the radio class; I've taken stesps to distribute proof we have this room to everybody, but some can't be fixed. On the other hand, I liked getting to learn how everything works, getting to be an ASA signatory was pretty cool. Schedules sometimes isn't entirely cooperative, but overall I think I've set things up to be smoother next year, I started a file named org.2013 containing a timeline of everything I think you need to do. I think we should have a TA in every class, since I found myself TAing in classes I was taking, which is bad. phurst: How do you double-space in quantum optics? dove: You use twice as many modes as you need. This is required for boson sampling; you need at least twice as many modes as you have photons, which makes the sampling problem computationally difficult to solve. afarrell: The dragon hanging from the ceiling begins to spew actual flames and lights other things on fire, which lights laptopland and codetaku's hair on fire. What do you do? dove: Get the save in case of fire box, but I don't know where it is. There's an extinguisher outside that I'd use if it was necessary even though the policy is to not fight fires; if it was a flood I'd hit the breaker behind the door. I might hit it anyway, but I might get flak for the downtime on the office heads and sipb-door. adehnert: You might get wanked at. dove: I'd get wanked at no matter what I do. dwilson: Pick a member who is here. Ask them a question you don't think they can answer, and then answer it after they've failed. dove: Does it have to be computer-related? dwilson: Traditionally. dove: Who is responsible for the formalization of the uncertainty principle? phurst: I want to say Heisenberg, but it seems like a trick question. dove: Robertson. bbaren: What can/should SIPB do to make people feel more welcome? dove: Welcome faces we don't see; I think people introduce themselves, but when I came to my first meeting it was definitely an awkward experience; I showed up expecting an introduction, but I sat in the corner and the meeting came and passed and nobody said anything until afarrell started talking to me and showed me how to use barnowl. I think we should've had something in place that would've prevented that. We also need a system for getting prospectives to make projects; there's a lot of talk about 'what project do you want to join?' but a lot of projects require experience; the only way we're going to get people with low experience is if there are projects with lots of easy work that hasn't been done. We need to make SIPB not Scripts-B, so to speak. glasgall: What are some projects you'd like SIPB to take interests in? dove: I'd like an electric sheep server. bbaren: We should start SETI@SIPB. achernya: mkc's right there. bbaren: That's bitcoin@SIPB. achernya: What's SMR missing? We have art, vintage computers, newer computers, really new computers. dove: IIRC, we only have one KVM. achernya: We have two. dove: I'd like to have at least two or three. adehnert: People mostly bring their laptops in. dove: So why do you need to be in SMR? adehnert: You don't, usually. dove: In that case, a couch. adehnert: It helps to have people in there when you're installing a server. adehnert: pbaranay wants to know the collective noun for a group of doves. dove: Uh, I know it's strange. phurst: 'strange of doves' is wrong. dove: I don't know... apparently it's dule or flight or piteousness kaduk: We try to make this a nice place for people to be, and we have the monolith which has a bunch of useful stuff. Is there anything we can maybe add to it that'd make the office an even better place? dove: We have a lot covered, and just when I think I've figured everything out, I think of something new. Even down to having canned air, soldering irons, etc. I think we could use more laptop space, since I think the office heads get used infrequently compared to the number of laptops used. I almost never have any space in laptopland. bbaren: Please point towards the Stata center. [dove points South.] bbaren: Please point towards Singapore. [dove points straight down.] ine: Is there any work members can do to help with the technical structure for IAP? dove: Unlike everybody else, I'm not a super coder guy, I'm still learning programming myself; I don't think I'll be able to write a django website in one fell swoop. That's definitely a place people can help me out. I have a list of ideas that I want, and a rough idea of how to fit them into objects, but left to my own devices it'll take me way too long. achernya: The gavel resides in the nyancat. Before that it was in the dragon. The year before, it was in the rings. Predict the next gavel-holder and where it will hang from the ceiling. dove: Is there a new gavel-holder every year? bbaren: Sometimes. kaduk: The write-enable rings were the holder for many years. dove: I'm tempted to say the hard disk platter, but I don't think people hang out on this side enough for it to be that, so I'm going to go with mumble mumble suffed animal. dwilson: What stuffed animal should SIPB have in the office. dove: Cthulhu. I'm in the CCCth, but they're inactive. phurst: They're not inactive, they're just dreaming. achernya: What's your favorite and least favorite project? dove: My favorite project is probably Scripts, since I just put my own page up and it's pretty cool, and I like that you can get domains with MIT pretty easily. I know a lot of people outside of MIT who think that it's really cool. My least favorite I guess would be the news server, because noone knows how to use it or do anything and that was the first thing I asked about. vasilvv: Is the gopher server still a thing? quentin: It is. bbaren: I move jbarnold ask a question. jbarnold: Why do you want to be a SIPB member? dove: This is a question you can answer sort of incorrectly very easily; I want to say "I want to help FTGOS, and stay involved, etc.", but ultimately that's not a good answer, since you need to FTGOS to be a member. I already send out e-mails, I'm already a signatory, you can basically do anything without being a member. But I think if you think about the reason we have membership, it's because we want to decide who we want to associate with, and I think I want to be a member of SIPB because I want to have all the benefits of membership in SIPB. bbaren: At this time, I'd like to ask all non-members to leave the office. [Begin closed session.] [dove elected 14-0-0.] [Meeting opens.] Other Other Other: bbaren: SIPB elections are in a week. If you want to run for an officer position, you need to be an active full member, and need to be at that meeting (except for member-at-large, for which you're automatically nominated as an active full member.) The meeting was adjourned at 20:19. Minutes taken and submitted by phurst.