NOTE: This is an archive of my old blog. Go to http://gonium.net for my current website.

But – I just want connectivity! 1

Posted by md on December 29, 2005

Status quo:

  • A mobile phone with O2′s Genion contract
  • My Motorola RAZR V3

  • A WLAN-based internet access, provided by Transkom. I have to bridge approximately 500m and a railroad line, so I need a big antenna:
    A Linksys WRT54G with OpenWRT firmware and a decent 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:


Latency during 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.

Resistance is futile! 4

Posted by md on December 03, 2005

Sometimes you have the opportunity to try new technologies. This happened on Thursday in Stuttgart:

Resistance is futile!

Beside looking moronic when surfing the web, the belt is heavy. But you have a crisp picture on the screen, and you can still see through it. This works astonishing well. This belt has been designed to aid technicians doing complex maintenance tasks, it is used for example in aircraft maintenance.

But: The company producing this particular model was going bankrupt. If you think about the look, this is quite understandable.

The quest for good presentations 2

Posted by md on November 27, 2005

How often have you been looking forward to the end of an presentation? Most presentations deal with interesting things, usually the speaker has something to tell. But why is it that we do not appreciate the presentations? When I see how Microsoft presents their new strategy, it is even visually ugly.

As a part of my job, I have to give a lot of presentations. So what if my presentations are boring as well? What if I want to communicate my ideas, but my presentation just doesn’t hit the mark? So I delved in the topic, here are my findings.

The quest starts with this post in Presentation Zen, which I consider essential reading by now (the blog as well as this post). Up to this point, I always though presentations have to be composed of bullets, each bullet outlining what you want to do. During presentation, you just talk about your bullets. Make an introduction, have a logical ordering. Just as you would do when writing an article.

But then, I saw that there is something else: The Lessig method. Read the article above, watch the movies. For the impatient: Basically, Lessig buts only a single word written in some typewriter font on a black transparency. There’s no distraction from what he has to tell. He tells a story, instead of presenting bullets.

If you go on to Dick Hardt’s presentation, you cross the border between presentation and entertainment. See it for yourself: movie link. There is something else than bullet points. Something serious to consider. Maybe it isn’t so difficult to give a presentation that allows your audience to follow your ideas.

However, these examples do not deal with scientific topics. As a researcher in computer science, I have to communicate abstract ideas that can not be easily connected with images and the like. Time for an experiment. I gave a Lessig-style presentation about my scientific work to other fellow Ph.D. students in Kaiserslautern. Most of them didn’t know my work, so this was about presenting the general ideas. You can download the presentation as a movie (german only).

This is not a perfect presentation (due to the recording, I hope to improve). But it shows that you can even communicate technical ideas Lessig-style. The audience’s feedback was really astonishing: During the presentation, there was a vibrant discussion. People understood my ideas. After the recording ended, I collected some opinions. No one rejected this style of presentation.

However, I have my doubts whether this presentation style suits a scientific conference.
But this part of the quest is to be discussed another time.