Not that straightforward, actually. Apple includes the Hoefler Text font in Mac OS X – its a really nice and readable professional font. Here’s what I did:

(1) You need to obtain the font in the opentype format (otf). Be careful: for me, the TTF version didn’t work. The Postscript type 1 version worked great.
(2) Use otftotfm -a to convert and install the files:

otftotfm -a -e texnansx HoeflerText-Regular.otf -fkern -fliga LY1--HoeflerText-Regular

This installs the regular form in the .texlive subdirectory of your home directory. Do this for all the font shapes you want to use. In the last step you need to create a .fd file:

\DeclareFontFamily{LY1}{HoeflerText}{}\DeclareFontShape{LY1}{HoeflerText}{m}{n}%
{ < -> LY1--HoeflerText-Regular }{}
\DeclareFontShape{LY1}{HoeflerText}{m}{it}{ < -> LY1--HoeflerText-Italic }{}
\DeclareFontShape{LY1}{HoeflerText}{m}{sl}{ < -> LY1--HoeflerText-Bold }{}
\DeclareFontShape{LY1}{HoeflerText}{b}{n}{ < -> LY1--HoeflerText-Bold }{}\DeclareFontShape{LY1}{HoeflerText}{b}{it}%
{ < -> LY1--HoeflerText-BoldItalic }{}

Put this in ~/.texlive2008/texmf-var/tex/latex/HoeflerText/LY1HoeflerText.fd. Again, make sure that all font shapes you want to use are included.

In your Latex document, put

\usepackage[LY1]{fontenc}
\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{HoeflerText}

to use the font.

The picture above was CCed on flickr by liikennevalo, thanks!

Arrived in Berkeley yesterday evening, living in a lovely garden cottage. It doesn’t really seem to matter whether you return your green ticket when you leave the US – I forgot last time, and the immigration officer didn’t even ask about it.

Berkeley is a beautiful city. At least in North Berkeley, people say “hello” when they meet on the streets. Everything is green, the Campus is great.

Pros:

• Coffee at Peets (Telegraph Avenue)
• Wheather is great (Spring, almost 20°C)
• View over the SF bay

Cons:

• Cody’s, the famous bookstore, has moved. Not in Telegraph avenue any more.
• Cal swag too expensive.
• I’ve walked too much.

Google is a definite success in terms of functionality and marketing. In the Google TechTalk series, Seth Godin presents some key factors of Google’s success – and why other companies didn’t succeed.

Seth Godin is a brilliant presenter: He uses non-stylish slides, but they always underline his point – you can watch the 50 minute presentation and enjoy it. So, go and download the video – or watch it online. Just two of his findings:

1. He emphasizes the point that Google satisfies both web surfers and web advertisers needs: With the Google ads, you can see the advertisements you’re interested in because you just searched for it. Simple, but very effective.
2. Google ideas are spread from person to person directly – they don’t need advertisements etc. Think of Google Earth for example: everyone talked about it half a year ago, but I’ve never seen any advertisement. This is a very good example of viral marketing.

A movie goes about two hours. If you enjoy the movie, you will not notice that you just spend two hours. It will touch you, and you will have a lot to think about – at least for a good movie. A talk of Vinton G. Cerf feels exactly like a good movie.

March 10th, 2006, University Saarbrücken: In a 300-people auditorium, people are standing in the back, and google employees give away google notebooks (er, unfortunately only the paper ones)

Vinton Cerf is currently vice president of google and “chief internet evangelist”. He is often seen as one of the fathers of the internet. Nobody doubts that the winner of the 2004 turing award knows what he’s talking about – in the first few seconds, he already won the audience by starting with “Vielen Dank meine Damen und Herren…” – he once lived in Saarbrücken.

Since we arrived just in time, I didn’t get a regular seat but I am sitting in the back of the auditorium on a small table. I only see one third of the transparencies, but since he talks, this doesn’t matter.

During his talk (“Tracking the Internet into the 21st century”), he lists the challenges that we currently face with the structure of the internet on a technical level. Dr. Cerf is really enthusiastic about mobile devices – the net currently consists of 360 million hosts, but there are 2 billion mobiles around. Mobile applications have a huge potential.

The Internet Protocol (IP) suite has laid the foundation of the internet success story. I never thought about why in detail, but Dr. Cerf points me to the right direction: the IP suite is a layered protocol stack. This enables applications to use e.g. a TCP connection to transport data (like your browser uses a HTTP-connection to the webserver). However, only the webserver and your browser needs to understand the HTTP protocol. The network devices in between just transport the information from the sender to the recipient. This sounds really simple, and it is. But this design enabled the development of applications that reuse existing network infrastructures – which is why the internet has grown to its current size. (Note to self: Remember that end-to-end protocols and layers are good for open, scalable systems.)

Dr. Cerf continues to compare the design decisions that were made in the seventies with today’s requirements. Often, the protocols are not capable of handling today’s requirements, but it is hard to change the environment. If you take IPv6 as an example, the protocol suite offers a lot of advantages. But you need to change the way you set your infrastructure up, and therefore organizations are reluctant to implement it. And home users are just not interested in the deployment off something that has no direct benefit to them.

You can find more hints in my raw notes. He continued to talk about mobility, security, threats, routing, the DNS system, intellectual property protection (“hey, content industry, embrace the new technologies!”) and the lacking competition in the broadband market.

If Dr. Cerf would be able to start over, he would do another design around the end-to-end connectivity principle. He would add authentication and flexible VPN memberships, incorporate IP mobility, confidentiality and think about flexible binding of DNS names to mobile IPs. But currently, he is involved in the development of the InterPlaNetary Internet (IPN), an attempt to reuse existing satellites to communicate with other spacecrafts. Basically, you cannot use TCP/IP because e.g. congestion control will not work for roundtrip times of 40 minutes. The project needs to deal with communication endpoints that become unreachable for hours (e.g. because a satellite is hidden behind the moon). This sounds really interesting – maybe it can be used for terrestrial applications as well.

After one and a half our, the audience asked questions for another half an hour, and google funded a nice reception. If you have the chance to see Vinton G. Cerf, go there and enjoy the performance.

I think it is time to wrap up my experiences regarding presentations. Now, I investigted how I do presentations for almost 5 months, I have given a lot of presentations and used the opportunities to experiment a little. Now, being at a conference and seeing a lot of presentations, it almost hurts.

The picture above shows the average computer science conference powerpoint deck. Actually, the talk was really interesting and good, but the powerpoint slides were just useless. Please, get away from using bullet lists and putting a lot of text on slides. Of course, you can break the rule if it helps your talk. Think of giving a talk, and the slides are just the background that may help you – or not.

Use pictures. Not only diagrams, but real pictures. Get them from Flickr or iStockPhoto. Tell a story. Even if you are just explaining technical details, you can use an example to illustrate it. And connect your story to pictures. If you talk about the EGEE project, you can use very impressive pictures of particle accelerators, etc. Avoid templates. After the first conference day, no one can stand them any more. This is especially true for GGF slides, e.g. the IP policy slide.

My fear was that my presentation doesn’t look reputable. But this isn’t true – you must make sure you know what you’re talking about, and foster discussions whenever possible. You audience will appreciate your efforts.

This GGF, I really feel the schizophrenic nature of standardization work:

1. As a student, I have to throw away all cool features of my scheduler. Ouch. It hurts.
2. As co-chair of the OGSA-RSS Working Group (Open Grid Services Architecture – Resource Selection Services), I have to go for a simple interface that can be mapped to a lot of projects.

I feel that I have to think about it for a time until I’ll be happy with it.

I’m on the road again, towards Athens for GGF 16. Two scandals so far:

1. Lufthansa has stopped giving you metal cutlery. I can’t believe it.
2. Global Grid Forum and Enterprise Grid Alliance will merge.

Lufthansa now gives you those stupid plastic spoons etc. that tend to break during your meal. This sucks.

I don’t yet know what to think about the GGF-EGA merger: On one hand, it may be a good thing to join the forces of the two organizations in order to move to standardization. On the other hand, there will be more industry people arround and I am concerned that scientists will not be able to allocate the same amount of resources for their contribution to the standardization process.

I am also wondering why the news are not on the websites so far. I received a public email, so I think it is safe to write about it.

• A mobile phone with O2′s Genion contract



• A WLAN-based internet access, provided by Transkom. I have to bridge approximately 500m and a railroad line, so I need a big antenna:
  
  OK, this setup has definitely a very low WAF.

Problem

Since WLAN has never been designed as a backbone technology, the uplink’s reliability is poor. Bandwidth is fine, but since I frequently use SSH, this is not enough. VOIP? No way… Check out my smokeping stats for the last year:

Alternatives

• Ask for DSL. The guy at the local T-Punkt needed 5 Minutes to figure out that I have fiber glass lines – but there’s a 95 percent chance they will manage to provide DSL for me. What I need to determine whether it’s feasible? An analog telephone line! So please pay 60 + 15 Euro so that we can tell you we can’t do it. Next provider please.
• Arcor has started a WiMAX testbed in Kaiserslautern. When I applied for it, I received an email stating “Sorry, you’re not in range. [...] If you move to Kaiserslautern in the close future, please notify us.” Hello? I am living there, at least that’s what I call this town for several years now.
• Kabel Deutschland provides cable broadband access, with very nice conditions. But they ask me to get something installed in the basement, and they do not allow me to have satellite dish in parallel – which I already have. Rumors are around that the reliability is not that good anyway.
• I even tried to get an offer for a glass fiber to rent, but the local company didn’t even manage to send me the offer.

Alternatives?!?

Lacking additional alternatives, I am now going for the DSL solution. I actually don’t want a telephone line, but there’s no way around. Welcome to Kaiserslautern, home of future-oriented research institutes.