Puppet and a bunch of others last summer and concluded none fit our
workflow well, but we could re-evaluate that.
-_Contact: geofft, scripts-team_
+*Note:* mitchb has begun working on this. Coordinate with him if you'd like to
+work on this project.
-We'd like a cron job to automatically tell us if
-there are RPM packages installed on some but not all of the servers,
-or if there are changes in /etc, other than hostname and such, that we
-haven't committed to the scripts Subversion repository.
+_Contact: geofft, scripts-team_
## SIPB Library
the library books also existed online in some sort of sane, searchable
database. One possible platform is the [Exhibit](http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/) project (which originates from a collaboration between the Haystack group in CSAIL and the MIT Libraries). This would require mostly just making a spreadsheet of the information.
-_Contact: pbaranay, fawkes_
+_Contact: zhangc, fawkes_
## Improve the Setup and UI for new users of Zephyr
_Contact: afarrell_
-## MITeX
-
-Not a fully formed thought, yet, but the basic idea is to have a web app that lets users create a document, and then it texs the document nicely for them, based on some template that they've selected, and gives them a PDF. They should have the ability to edit the source or just use the WYSIWYG editor.
-
-_Contact: jhamrick_
-
## Build a web client providing full control to the user
Create a web browser extension (or possibly a stand-alone browser) that is "web-developer antagonistic". It essentially takes full advantage of the
_Contact: xavid_
-## Bazki
-
-[Bazki](http://bazki.mit.edu/) is a wiki written in Python designed around several principles: structured data with object-oriented inheritance; using a wiki language with powerful macros that can be compiled into either HTML or PDF (via LaTeX); and making the content editable offline using a VCS. Bazki works enough to to be useful, but it has lots of room for improvement and probably would benefit from some design changes. It could also definitely use documentation.
-
-_Contact: xavid_
-
## A zephyr log viewer
Many SIPB-affiliated people use the [Zephyr](http://zephyr.1ts.org/) messaging system, and the [Barnowl](http://barnowl.mit.edu/) client for it in particular. Barnowl has a number of very nice features that make it easy to follow large amounts of zephyr traffic: search, color coding, auto-narrowing, etc. Barnowl can also store logs of zephyrs sent and received for future reference, but the logs are saved separated by class in a way that's quite annoying to navigate sometimes. A Barnowl-like interface (perhaps implemented as a Barnowl plugin) for viewing zephyr logs would be a great thing to have.
_Contact: oremanj_
-## Migrate Gutenbach from lprng to CUPS
-
-lprng is the past, and CUPS is the future! Our music player, Gutenbach, is currently running on lprng. With the rest of campus switching to CUPS, it's really time we did so as well. The filter needs to be rewritten for CUPS (and preferably in Python, this time), and the package needs to be redesigned to handle the way CUPS does things.
-
-_Contact: jhamrick_
-
## Multiple views in BarnOwl
[BarnOwl](http://barnowl.mit.edu/) nominally has views support. However, it consists of verifying that the view name is "main" and returning an error otherwise. It would be nice to maintain multiple sets of view state at once. This would involve figuring out semantics, moving some data structures around, adding the new functionality, designing some interface, and probably much testing for subtle bugs.
[Etherpad](http://etherpad.com/) is an awesome tool for online collaborative text editing. It's recently been open-sourced; set up a Java servlet container on XVM, make it work, and then start adding cool MIT features like, oh, the ability to edit daemon.etherpad-writable files in AFS, login with certs and see all your files, and print to Athena printers. Or add cool non-MIT features such as an Emacs client (possibly proxying [Infinote](http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/wiki/Infinote/Protocol), which appears to have some F/OSS implementations already), or integration with [codepad](http://codepad.org/) or [gists](http://gist.github.com/).
+*Note:* tvald has set up [etherpad.mit.edu](http://etherpad.mit.edu/).
+Coordinate with him if you'd like to get features into etherpad.mit.edu.
+
_Contact: geofft_
## RFC pretty-printing
-I think every RFC website I know of just puts the entire RFC plain text in a <pre&rt; tag. It should be possible to parse out the headers and footers every "page", make section headings into useful ones, and reflow the non-diagram text in a proportional font, which would make RFCs more readable.
+I think every RFC website I know of just puts the entire RFC plain text in a <pre> tag. It should be possible to parse out the headers and footers every "page", make section headings into useful ones, and reflow the non-diagram text in a proportional font, which would make RFCs more readable.
_Contact: geofft_
_Contact: geofft, broder_
+## Zcommit: A git-to-zephyr connector
+
+For git repositories that we have control over, it's easy to use our home-grown [post-receive zephyr hook](http://web.mit.edu/snippets/git-hooks/zephyr-post-receive) to send zephyrs when somebody pushes. We can't directly edit hooks on sites like [Github](http://github.com). However, Github does support [submitting a POST request](http://help.github.com/post-receive-hooks/) to an arbitrary URL when somebody pushes. We've created [zcommit.mit.edu](http://zcommit.mit.edu) to allow people to send commit zephyrs from Github. Now we'd like to extend it to other public code hosting platforms with similar APIs, such as [Bitbucket](http://www.bitbucket.org/help/ServiceIntegration#post) and [Google Code](http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/PostCommitWebHooks).
+
+_Contact: broder, gdb_
+
## A couple of C/C++ hacking projects
* Each AFS cell has its own database of users and groups. If you run `ls`, it will look up users and groups against the local machine's conception of users and groups, so if you take a stock Linux etc. machine and look at most any AFS cell, you'll get a bunch of unhelpful numbers. Make an interface that stands a decent chance of being merged into upstream `ls` to permit it to call `pts examine` (or, rather, the AFS library equivalent) against the appropriate servers instead of `getpwnam` etc. on AFS files. See also [Debathena Trac #300](http://debathena.mit.edu/trac/ticket/300).
_Contact: mostly geofft_
+## Binary compatibility between OSes
+
+Help the cause of OS ecumenism! FreeBSD provides [binary
+compatibility](http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/linuxemu.html) with
+Linux operating systems: an add-on module to the kernel knows how to
+interpret Linux-"personality" programs, just like the base kernel can
+interpret FreeBSD-"personality" ones, and a standard component in the
+FreeBSD ports system will install a number of libraries from Fedora 10
+in /compat/linux.
+
+However, the number of people who use FreeBSD as their own OS is limited
+compared to those who use Linux or Mac OS X. Possible projects here
+include BSD binary compatibility on Linux, or porting FreeBSD's Linux
+binary compatibility to Mac OS X (which has a bunch of BSD-like parts,
+but whose core kernel is actually Mach). The latter would allow running
+Linux locker software on [MacAthena](http://macathena.mit.edu).
+
+_Contact: geofft, kaduk_
+
+## Consolidate and Update Athena documentation
+
+Athena documentation these days seems somewhat lacking and/or hard-to-find, which should not be the case. Athena is already foreign enough to incoming students, who are more likely to use their laptops than an Athena machine. Help make it easier by consolidating and updating available Athena documentation so that people know here how to use their Public folder, their Private folder, their dotfiles, and so on.
+
+_Contact: zhangc, kasittig_
+
+## Web zephyr
+
+BarnOwl is a great program, but it's typically most useful when you can SSH to a server somewhere and run it in screen. It would be nice to have some sort of webpage where you could send and view zephyrs. I've written one, but it's not ideal -- in particular, it depends on having a daemon running somewhere to collect and store zephyrs. There's probably a better way, though I have no idea what it is. (Zcommit would be useful for sending; viewing is trickier.) Ideas?
+
+*Note:* There is already a [Webzephyr](http://webzephyr.mit.edu/), but it was
+written before AJAX and other modern niceties. You may wish to talk to jdaniel
+or other webzephyr folks about this.
+
+_Contact: cesium_
+
+## MITeX
+
+Online WYSIWYG Latex editor. Features include Google Preview and equation support. See [http://mitex.mit.edu](http://mitex.mit.edu).
+
+_Contact: leonidg, jhamrick, mats_a, jgross
+
## Your Project Here
SIPB can help you out in terms of both computing resources and
sipb-www / wiki.git / blobdiff