Boring part

• Spring 2016 Talk Series — Wednesdays 20:00, WeH 5421

  • Tomorrow, 20 Apr – bescott with CoffeeScript => WebGL Solar Systems!

  • Next week, 27 Apr – jpdoyle with Real-Time 3D Graphics from the Ground Up
• Treasurer's report

  • Tentative FY2017 budget after 1st-round appeals

    • Revised up to $2891 ($391 non-capital + $2500 capital)
    • Demosplash food is properly zeroed out now
    • No funding for machine room enhancements or retrocomputing; just maintenance and upkeep
  • Unspent capital for FY2016
• Purchasing
  • New requests

    • 8-Pin EPS Extension Cable (~$13.50, Amazon)

    • 4 Pin Fan Power Extension Cable (~$2.50, Amazon)

    • Tartan is willing to donate an APC NetShelter AR203 once grantwu migrates everything currently on it.

  • Deferred
    • Second new rack, to replace Rack 2 (~$400)

    • Power transfer switches (~$605, Amazon)

    • We need to decide whether/how we're going to purchase these soon, if we intend to get them with FY2016 funds
• Retrocomputing Committee report
  • Retro Gaming Night wrap-up
    • Budget shenanigans
    • Prize distribution
  • Demosplash planning

    • Are we meeting before finals or not? (when2meet)

• Idea on improving meetings - grantwu
  • Information gathering at meetings is an anti-pattern

    • If a question can be answered authoritatively by one or more people, the question should be answered before the meeting starts and placed on the agenda

  • Polling is inefficient: We should not have agenda items that recur over and over every week

    • Example: This is the sixth week there has been something to the effect of "purchase another rack". This is the 12th meeting we have discussed purchasing power transfer switches.

      • In practice, these usually actually haven't been discussed, despite being listed on the agenda

      • These are a special case and have been continually deferred as they are not strictly necessities, but are possible options for using the last of our FY2016 funds
    • Move to an event based/notification architecture
      • If something needs to be bought, send email
        • Per constitution (Article IV, Section 3), "Spending on individual line items is presented at a meeting and approved by the Treasurer."
      • Things that could potentially happen on the email thread:
        • Figuring out where to buy the item
        • Reminders that action needs to happen
        • Notification of purchases (that have already been approved in a meeting)
        • Reimbursement-tracking
    • Secondary benefit: Clear record of what has happened on an issue and the last time progress happened
      • No need to search through collections of meeting minutes
  • Separate operations meeting proposal
    • grantwu would like to try this this Saturday
    • grantwu can set up an agenda that includes the "Operations" items in the Interesting Part

Interesting part

• Open Hacking Hours
• Future events

  • Tue 3 May, 21:00, Rashid – Movie night: Mystery Science Theater 3000 Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

• Operations
  • mjrosenb's hardware
    • An X8SIL and an X8SIL-F
    • 48 GB of ECC RAM
    • Tested on Saturday, both work
    • Need power/fan extension connectors
    • Need a different CPU heatsink if we use the 1U case
  • engine01 – Build status update from grantwu?
    • Works. Nix installation postponed indefinitely until installation is less fragile.
  • transit-2 (and the former kvm04) – Build status update from aliruu?
    • Installer crashes on former kvm04, worked on other machines (possibly dead 2950)
  • storage-4
    • stroucki is not here
  • Switch fan installations
    • Should we do this on 23 or 30 Apr? (kbare out-of-town 23 Apr)