Minutes

23 Oct 1997

October 23rd Present: Tim, Dennis, Darron, Tim, Ian, Simon, Dan [two new members! woo hoo!] Meeting comes to order 6:05. Miscellaneous discussion of pop/food restock issues, returning empties to help keep office clean. We still need a table! The VAXen are coming and must be moved quite soon. As soon as Tim and Wayne can get together they will arrive here, and need to have a safe home waiting for them… Ken might be able to spare one, still everyone please prick up your ears! Relevant issues still include:

talk to VMS folks at UCC regarding DECNet stuff - Wayne will sit down with one or more of us and walk us through the installation he did, start to finish, in case the unthinkable should happen and we have to do it all over again. This should be a learning experience as well as actually accomplishing something useful! Maybe running a public version of Netscape on one (since some folks have come in wanting to use it). Offered to us: two PDP 11’s, some 300 baud modems, some VT100’s and maybe a few VT220’s. It was damp in there X number of years ago; this must be the infamous Deep Storage closet… (Darren arrives! Cheers for Mister TIE and his NEW JOB that KEEPS HIM FROM OUR MEETINGS! Let’s be thankful Linux allows almost complete remote admin!) yakko.com signup procedure gone over again, no changes from last meeting. Let’s get that database going, people! Darren says he’ll attempt to install the Apache patches to his app to make it Web-accessible. Steve: I met Tuesday with some folks about redesigning the CS webpages, what needs to be done and how we should go about doing it. Only two out of eight folks who emailed me showed up, so we need to work out a second meeting time during the week. This is high priority and we need individuals who can seriously commit that time. I’m meeting with Wycoff and others regarding what we can and can’t do. Please mail me and let me know when you are available, since the time is still open to debate – weekdays, weekends, evenings. This won’t be as large a job as was previously thought since most of the site is already pretty well designed, apart from some broken links. It will be a long-term project, and associate the name of our organization with the entire CS department, and I’d like this to be the main focus of the Club until we can finish it.
First - fix broken links and bad HTML - Second phase - change little details (backgrounds, etc) - Third phase - any larger stuff On a more fun note: Tim and I were tossing around the idea of making Wiley a game server for Mayhem and possibly Quake. I’ve put Net-Link’s Quake server together which will probably be up and running next week. Eventually I’d like to make more stuff, textbased and GUI. The fun parts of computing, what the club was founded on, is the easiest way for people to learn how to program and understand networks. [And hey, we can always use an excuse for a hardware upgrade…] All the files are ready to go, space is reserved on Wiley’s hard drive…which brings us to… Are we going to move the Pentium motherboard to Yakko? Steve: I believe Wiley as a game server would be preferable to having it host the “OS of the week”, but of course if we get another PC up that would still be worth pursuing. Darren: qoholeth didn’t renew his account, his chess server software is still sitting around so I’ll copy it and get it running again. Did we want the talker (miniMOO) up? Steve: Sure, put it on Wiley. [Discussion of partition/space issues] That’s the agenda! Other issues? Tim: WSA Report! Still sucks. BUT! Budget proposal as mentioned in Herald gives some hope for the future. They want to spend two thousand bucks of WSA’s money to get some touchy-feely motivational speaker to come motivate everybody to stop infighting… The other thing, actually useful, they are making some progress with the bus proposal, promotions so people will actually know about it and hopefully use it. I will draft a WSA proposal with Cory Watt to restore WMU student homepages. As usual I would love any assistance on flyer/pamphlets/petitionss. Everybody grab one when you leave and stick ‘em places! Treasurer’s Report: 85 bucks grossed on sales this week, balance hovering right around 2,000. I’ll prepare a report on our cash outlay on food and pop versus gross so we can see if this is really worthwhile… Steve: Nobody else? Meeting adjourned, 6:45. See ya later! 2,000.

The Computer Club at

Western Michigan University

Minutes