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Vienna
I got to Vienna this morning; the Holy Father, Benedict XVI, had arrived in Austria the previous day, and was breaking the bread in the Stephansdom projected onto a giant screen outside watched by all the available faithful as I walked past.
Didn't in the end go to the London Aquarium on Saturday, but to the British museum; saw a wonderful piece at the end of the Coptic gallery, late-nineteenth-century Ethiopian depicting the defeat of the Italian army, with iconography such that the Ethiopians had both the Virgin Mary and the Maxim gun on their side.
I'm afraid I can't recommend the Orient Express; the train stopped at two-hour intervals from Strasbourg to Vienna and woke me up each time. The LGV Est manages to rise to the level of boredom of air travel; you sit in a comfy chair, and 3% of the output of one of France's larger nuclear power stations pushes you along through the darkening evening without your noticing, except that when you got in you were in Paris and when you get out two hours later you're in Alsace. The countryside from Paris to Vienna seems entirely to be farm-covered hills of various degrees of rollingness; half the time the train runs at the bottom of sidings and the rest of the time along the top of ridges through just enough trees to make photography irritating.
I've been attending the SHARCS2007 cryptography conference here, causing some slight surprise by being actually unaffiliated rather than by leaving my affiliation field blank to disguise my intentions. There are few blank affiliations, though one person who looked perfect to be cast as First Anarchist in an adaptation of 'The Man Who Was Thursday' had simply 'Government of Israel' and two or three, to whom I admit I did not attempt to make conversation, had 'Russian Security Service' and asked questions at one of the talks which made it clear that mathematics was not really their thing. I met up again with a lot of pleasant mathematicians from all over Europe, and I must admit I felt at home. I love the academic camaraderie of conferences, and a habit of casually reading papers means I can bluff my way pretty effectively in dinner- and coffee-table conversation; now, if only I could do the actual mathematics ...
Walked back from the conference meal along the banks of the Donaucanal, the buildings variously flood-lit. I'm not sure it's as nice as Berlin, but I could get to like Vienna.
Didn't in the end go to the London Aquarium on Saturday, but to the British museum; saw a wonderful piece at the end of the Coptic gallery, late-nineteenth-century Ethiopian depicting the defeat of the Italian army, with iconography such that the Ethiopians had both the Virgin Mary and the Maxim gun on their side.
I'm afraid I can't recommend the Orient Express; the train stopped at two-hour intervals from Strasbourg to Vienna and woke me up each time. The LGV Est manages to rise to the level of boredom of air travel; you sit in a comfy chair, and 3% of the output of one of France's larger nuclear power stations pushes you along through the darkening evening without your noticing, except that when you got in you were in Paris and when you get out two hours later you're in Alsace. The countryside from Paris to Vienna seems entirely to be farm-covered hills of various degrees of rollingness; half the time the train runs at the bottom of sidings and the rest of the time along the top of ridges through just enough trees to make photography irritating.
I've been attending the SHARCS2007 cryptography conference here, causing some slight surprise by being actually unaffiliated rather than by leaving my affiliation field blank to disguise my intentions. There are few blank affiliations, though one person who looked perfect to be cast as First Anarchist in an adaptation of 'The Man Who Was Thursday' had simply 'Government of Israel' and two or three, to whom I admit I did not attempt to make conversation, had 'Russian Security Service' and asked questions at one of the talks which made it clear that mathematics was not really their thing. I met up again with a lot of pleasant mathematicians from all over Europe, and I must admit I felt at home. I love the academic camaraderie of conferences, and a habit of casually reading papers means I can bluff my way pretty effectively in dinner- and coffee-table conversation; now, if only I could do the actual mathematics ...
Walked back from the conference meal along the banks of the Donaucanal, the buildings variously flood-lit. I'm not sure it's as nice as Berlin, but I could get to like Vienna.
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Someone from Fujitsu had spent three years and 2.8 million dollars demonstrating that, using three of the largest and most expensive FPGAs available, it was possible to do number-field-sieve on 768-bit numbers four times faster than on a $400 Opteron; not the way I'd have chosen to spend $2800000 of Fujitsu's money.
A very enthusiastic guy from Sun offered a 4-socket * 8-core * 8-thread "Victoria Falls" (Niagara successor) machine to the university group that had the most interesting open-source cryptanalytic project to run on it.
The COPACOBANA project had improved its DES-cracking core and now had average time to solve down to under a week on a box of 120 FPGAs which they will sell you for 60k euros.
Someone had ported OpenSSL to run on a PS3 at 83.9 4096-bit RSA signatures per second, versus 4.4 on a P4/2.53GHz.