CSUA Politburo Meeting Minutes 98/02/25
Brian Gaeke
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:: Attendance ::
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The Politburo
The President: Jon Kuroda (jon)
The Vice President: David Bushong (dbushong)
The Treasurer: Devin Jones (jones)
The Secretary: Brian Gaeke (brg)
The Librarian: Ben Schleimer (bensch)
All were present, if not at the same time, with the
exception of Devin.
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@@ New Members @@
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Eddie Leung (edleung)
Edwin Adhiprakasha (adhiprev)
Liesie Ho (liesie)
Grace Tahir (tahir)
** The meeting was called to order at Wed Feb 25 18:42:17 PDT 1998. **
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** President's Report **
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Jon:
I'm really tired and I had a midterm today that crushed me.
I talked to Prof. Katz about having a student-produced documentary
of the CS department, as proposed to the Politburo by Brian Gaeke
and Seth Schoen. The department would probably be able to buy
materials and equipment. Whenever you guys want to go bug them,
bug me, and I will act as a liaison/conduit.
Q. Are we an ASUC organization yet?
A. They are still expecting Jon as a signatory, and he still can't
be a signatory, and our new form isn't in because Clancy's out of
town. In short, we are still a mere ghost of an organization with
respect to our friends in Eshleman and Sproul Halls.
We tried to get a room for the general meeting but were utterly
unable to get a room. 337 (the lounge) was proposed, but called a
bad idea. HKN & UPE have 310. We will see if we can get 320, where
CalLUG holds meetings.
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## Vice President's Report ##
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Dave:
Nothing is new with web stuff. We got mail from James Wang asking
if he could change a bunch of stuff around; in response, we're
going to give him root (via scotsman) soon. The root password is
changing after the meeting. People who will have it at that point
will be Brian, Dave, and whoever asks Dave. (If they call me and
I don't recognize their voice, they lose. Mwahahaha.)
Q. Can the passwords across the machines please be synchronized?
A. Ask BRG, the [de-facto] DEC czar. The reason we're not using
Jon's scripts is because we're not using the soda passwords or home
directories.
Brian enumerates the shadowedness (or not) of all the machines'
password files.
Dave says that people with office accounts are allowed to do
basically what they will with the machines; however, we want to
get xterminal working on all of them so that anyone who wants can
use them for coursework.
Supposedly, Stefan is still trying to get transportation for Old Soda.
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?? Questions from the Panel ??
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Q. (Brian) Do we have power to the HPs?
A. (Dave & Jon) Who knows? Jon talked to an electrician a while back who
said that everything looked kosher. So there is a bug in either the HPs
or the electrician; however, this doesn't quite get us anywhere.
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$$ Treasurer's Report $$
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Proxy report from Jon:
The deadline for budget requests has been pushed back to next week.
Jon has been flaking on Devin for paperwork and stuff but is working
to rectify this.
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%% Secretary's Report %%
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Brian:
I'm not the secretary, I'm the DEC czar. As Tony once wrote when
he was secretary: "Sign in please. These minutes brought to you by
vi instead of Emacs."
We have more DECs working! bloody-mary and vodka are up with the
new networked /usr filesystem, which means they have a lot more
programs installed but are significantly slower (sigh.) We would
like to get one of the HPs, once one of them is online, to be the
fileserver because it has FDDI and so do all the DECs; this, we
think, would significantly improve NFS throughput. Anyone with any
helpful suggestions, NFS-related or otherwise, please send them to
office-root@csua, because we'd like to hear them.
We also have a machine running, mirabile dictu, NetBSD 1.3! (Dave
asked me before whether we'd tried booting BSD on one of these
DECs, and I said, "Well, I tried OpenBSD..." and he replied, "Try
NetBSD.") This is all the work of Mike Howard, who spent the time
hooking various random monitors and hard drives to this machine
until he got a more-or-less working combination, for which we are
much obliged.
The only remaining unsolved problem, it seems to me, is a program
which will encrypt passwords in all the various random formats and
redistribute them to the different machines. I think this will not
be extraordinarily difficult to write.
As grinding sounds began to emanate from the back of the room,
Brian then pointed out that old manhattan's disk is beginning to
fail, in exactly the same fashion as old martini's disk around the
middle of last semester.
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&& Librarian's Report &&
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The librarian had a midterm, and as soon as Jon showed up, noted
that quorum would not be disturbed by his leaving, and so left.
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++ Czar(ina) Reports ++
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Help Sessions (Brian):
We're doing one on Makefiles which will be taught by Jon Kuroda
tomorrow. Anyone want to teach one on practical debugging methods,
on the 3rd? Dave volunteers (and also volunteers Mike...) We were
planning on covering gdb, assert, use of Gratuitous Printfs, and
using a really wonderful handout which Alan Coopersmith and Jennifer
Snider wrote.
We're planning, after that, to run one on Revision Control. Josh
MacDonald agreed to teach it; not only did he write PRCS, but he is
well-skilled in the theory of revision control. Pretty much everyone
in the room notes that they would really like to attend a session on
PRCS.
Donut Runs (Jon):
I raced to the place with aubie about 10 minutes before they closed,
and was informed by a very calm Kingpin Donuts person that the
donuts were 'taken care of'.
Brian notes that the 61B students doing their rational calculator
were very happy to see us and, of course, to consume 10 dozen donuts
in 5 1/2 minutes. Many thanks to Mike Howard and John Milford for
helping out here with funding, car usage, town crier, sneaking
donuts into Soda, and other things.
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-- Old Business --
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Item 1.
We will produce general meeting advertisements as soon as we are
able to get a room.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!! New Business !!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Item 1.
Dave: What is up with these soda load spikes? The load is varying
wildly.
Jon: It has something to do with the scheduler we're running.
David Petrou is working on making load averages under the lottery
scheduler a better-defined thing.
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== Comments from the Proletariat ==
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Jon: My midterm crushed me and I'm really tired. I turned in my first
time card for my new job -- 70 hours.
Dave: "I put down like 76 hours, gave it to Davin, and he didn't even
realize how much I had been working until after he'd signed it.
Then he went, `Aaah.'"
New members? Well, they left. Brian hopes they weren't 61B people who
had to run to their impending midterm. (But if they were, good luck.)
** Meeting adjourned at Wed Feb 25 19:12:18 PDT 1998. **
(The meeting included some closed proceedings.)
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|| The Next Politburo Meeting ||
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The next GENERAL meeting is next Wednesday (the 4th of March); the
next Politburo meeting will be the next Wednesday after that
(presumably, barring a hostile takeover of the Politburo by Mumbleco,
the 11th of March, at 6 PM in 337 Soda.)
--
Brian R. Gaeke, UC Berkeley -- b...@uclink4.berkeley.edu
"the iguana / in the petshop window on St Catherine Street / crested,
royal-eyed, ruling / its kingdom of water-dish and sawdust / dreams of
sawdust" - Margaret Atwood, "Dreams of the Animals"