I finished my first CERN post marvelling at the openness of CERN’s network to the Internet. I though I’d add a few things that I found fun and that are accessible without any kind of authentication.

• First off, the web page you’re usually presented with when going to cern.ch is CERN’s public web page, which is a nice bit of fluff, but not overly useful. There’s a link labeled “CERN users”, which takes you to the page you get when going to cern.ch from within CERN. This is much more informative, including an overview of what’s happening at CERN – seminars, conferences, other announcements.
• The summer student lectures have video and slides online, which is quite nice. For physicists, I recommend Antonio Pich’s Standard Model lecture, especially for its hilarious slides. There’s also an introduction to particle physics for non-physicists and a couple of lectures about CERN’s computing projects.
• Indico is CERN’s conference management system, which has a nice calendar with mouseover popups where you can get at the slides and minutes of the thousands of meetings and conferences that go on.
• Want to see what’s going on in CMS? There’s a page of web cams watching different parts of the detector complex, from the experimental cavern to the parking lot.
• For the more technically minded, here‘s a view of the status monitors for CERN’s accelerator complex. If you’d like to make sense of the blinkenlights, this page and the linked FAQ are pretty useful. More operational fun: Since CERN’s accelerator complex is rather old, parts of the status information are still transmitted via CCTV channels and, of all things, teletext – the CERN teletext server is a gateway for those of use using more modern receiver equipment.

I’m still amazed that all this stuff is public. Yes, the actual discussions surrounding new discoveries will be a lot more secretive, but I still like the idea that hundreds of millions of people can watch the SPS go through various stages of a power failure for their Sunday afternoon entertainment…

Update: Oh, the LHC vistar is a lot more interesting this weekend, as you can watch the progress of the second injection test.

19:00 Alternate injections into sector 78 and sector 23 which is pretty blooming amazing.

:)

Update^2: Due to the CERN reorg, most of the links to the accelerator stuff above are broken. Here is the new Vistar page.

At the end of July, I had to leave my previous lodgings in Ornex and move to Genève proper, where I now inhabit an apartement on the fifth floor of la Cité Universitaire with two colleagues. The move caught us ill-prepared in a number of crucial ways, and so the first evening went rather depressingly – the kitchen proved to be spacious, but rather empty (Three spoons, three forks, three butter knives, three plates, three glasses, three cups. One pan, one pot.), and so the first dinner went badly (our only source of salt being a can of anchovis).

Much worse, it turns out that although there is wireless internet avaiable, the charges for short stays are rather steep – two weeks would have been 70 CHF for an unexplained amount of connectivity, and probably limited to one PC. The other available WLAN is provided by the university, but they use MAC filters and a HTTPS secured login form to keep out guests. While pondering this depressing state of things, we chanced upon a third source of network connectivity, named ‘((o)) ville de geneve’ – which turns out to be Genève’s municipal WLAN, available in select spots around the city. It seems that our location was high enough to get stray signal from a stadium a couple of hundred meters away. Sadly, the connection was weak and required users to sit in exactly the right spot in our kitchen’s window bay or lean out of the window with the laptop. To rectify this untenable situation, we semi-seriously acquired a can of Pringles on our Friday shopping trip, and I went to town today in search of a PCMCIA card with an external antenna plug. It was impossible to obtain such a thing, but while browsing available WLAN adapters, I got the much better idea to simply take a USB adapter and build it directly into the antenna… I hopped over to the local Starbucks and verified that of course there was nothing original to that idea and people had done it before all over the Internets, using materials like a strainer, wok lids or fire extinguishers.

I bought a D-Link DWL-G122 USB plug and brought it home. Initially, we hoped to get enough signal advantage from just hanging the USB plug out of the window by its cable, but apparently its antenna is so much smaller that it compensated for the better reception. Some interesting results from that: reflection DOES make a difference – holding the adapter in front of a closed metal shutter or mounting it in our cooking pan definitely increased the signal strength. None of these methods were really practicable, though, so we decided to go the classical Yagi route. Eating the Pringles was pretty hard, but the results are worth it… We now have comfortable signal strength and the network is reexported around the entire apartment via the internal WLAN card in the attached computer, and the setup is even quite stable thanks to the fact that one of my roommates lent his tripod to our noble enterprise.

(Yes, the USB adapter and the Pringles cost just as much as just buying the Internet access would have, but would that have been as much fun?)

Update: On revisiting Edificom’s pricing information, I see that we actually managed to save some money (70 vs 115 CHF) AND gained the fun. Win!