Minnits - 25 February 2002

Mon 25 Feb 2002 Meeting Minutes

Compsoc Exec Minnits

25 February 2002

Present

NuExec

The AGM was held at s6 on Saturday, and Jake and Chris counted the votes; Jake has assured us that, under no circumstances, was any fiddling involded in any way, shape, or form, and the fact that H beat RON to president was honestly what the members wanted. We remain skeptical.

The results were as follows:

Jake described the handover process, before introducing the three present new members to their positions, and H to some presedential duties. While doing this, he mentioned some courses that must be taken:

In addition, Jake must tell ITS that H is now responsible for all of the suada/suahu accounts, which is a worrying thought.

Next Meeting

Obviously at least six of the new exec can make the current meeting time. Dave de la Motte, in his first official task as secretary, to mail Phil and check that Mondays at the City Arms is OK.

This is a somewhat bizarre statement to make, as Phil Stoneman will be reading these minnits (Hi, Phil!), but it’s what we decided, and so must go in regardless :-)

s6

Comments on s6:

Here followed much discussion, centering around start times and sleeping patterns. It was felt that starting at 8:00 on Fridays severely screwed with people’s bodies[1]. Another point with this was that most people buggered off home to sleep; therefore, if everybody slept at the same time, security could be a little lax.

The conclusions arrived at were that we would continue to start at 8:00pm on Fridays, and that the exec would act like travellers crossing enemy territory and take turns at watches. This would imply that the exec slept at the event. We’d do this at the next event as an experimentation, and see if it works.

Layout

The layout at s6 could have been improved. Essentially, we had not enough behind chairs, meaning that we couldn’t get around the room easily enough, and far too much in the middle or at the front. I suspect that this is a kickback from the B rooms, were we’re more tight than we are in the LIB romms.

The essential solution to this was that people put their PCs on the floor when arriving, thus making the arrangement lots easier. When we arrange the tables, we need to think before just going ahead and doing it.

James Ross to put a note on the webpage that tells people, when arriving at LANs, to put their machines on the floor and not on tables.

BFL

Tom booked the BFL on Tuesday, for the following times:

No confirmation has been received yet.

We decided that it would very definitly be a good idea to have two separate signup lists, one for each room. Come near the event, it would be a good idea to put the reserves on the first event onto the main list for the second event, at the end. There are twenty five on the provisional signup list, which is easily enough to warrent two rooms.

Sign-em-ups will go live after Easter, and after we’ve received room confirmation.

Servers

At most of the previous lans, Teapot has been music/file/game server, and it’s only a little box and shouldn’t have so much pressure on it the poor defenceless thing.

With two rooms, we are likely to need the following servers:

The music server is perfectly capable of running two hosts, and the CGI script will allow connection to whatever server you want - so Teapot and Brian[2] can both handle music for different rooms.

In addition, teapot could handle files with Brian handling games, and this would be a good thing.

We could also have a DNS server set up, facilitating access to everywhere.

Molotov

Tom hasn’t done anything with either quotas or PostgreSQL yet; he’ll either have to put this off to Phil Stoneman or save it until Easter or somewhen.

In addition, Jake apologises for using 350M of hard disk for Sluggy.

Phil has found some ports on Molotov that we could use potentially to run Servers on: 8008, 8009 are two of them.

Tom to meet Phil over a pint of beer, some peanuts and a set of poker chips and tell him how all the game servers are arranged.

Gamesoc

Chris mailed Edinburgh Gamesoc inviting them to a game of something. They have a Counterstrike clan, and are starting one for RTCW; they also play Starcraft, and wouldn’t mind a game of Quake.

Chris to mail Gamesoc and organise a QW friendly soon. Tom Ward to start a QuakeWorld server on port 8008-ish, so that our friends from outside the university can connect.

Academia

All of the feedback received from members wrt academic stuff was very positive; all email of it. New ideas springing forth from the fountains of ideas that are the new exec (you are all fountains of ideas, right?) included:

s7

Nutsy to book; End of W22, Friday 8pm to Sunday 10pm.

  1. To the extent that Jake went to bed at 11:00 on Sunday evening!!!

  2. Tom’s server