What with the US presidential elections taking place next week, the news sites are filling up more and more with election related stories (not matter how slight the connection). PhysOrg.com is getting one such story under the radar because it involves NASA astronauts on the International Space Station.

Now, I typically expect some hyperbole and metaphor in a news article – but I was a little surprised at how the article headlined itself in my RSS feed. Apparently, “few ballots will have traveled as far as those cast by two NASA astronauts“.

Hang about, though. The ISS is in low-earth orbit. And space, officially, starts at only 100 kilometres (or 62 miles). In fact, the US sometimes sets the bar that little bit lower at 80 kilometres (50 miles). In contrast, that is about the distance between where I used to work in Basingstoke, Hampshire and the centre of London. In fact, I currently live some 16,000 km or so from London – or about 160 times the distance that currently seperates me from outer space.

Even the article goes on to mention that the ISS orbits at about 220 miles (352 km) above the Earth’s surface.

What with the US having a presence in far flung places like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and any number of island territories in the Pacific, and the fact that Seattle on the Pacific coast is 3700 km (2300 miles) from Washington, DC, I think that this being the “furthest” vote is quite a stretch.

Of course – of they happen to be exactly on the opposite side of the world, then they will be as far away as possible. I somehow doubt NASA is going to bother to stage that specific event, though, since the actual distance involved is nothing compared to the fact that two votes for the next American president will be cast by people who aren’t even on this planet. That is the exciting precedent here – not a simple marvel of what, at the end of the day, is a simple internet connection from a satellite to a surface station, but rather an indicator of a future where more people will work in the airless region between the Earth and the Moon and still interact with events in an almost humdrum, daily way.

A couple of weeks ago Valve pushed out a clutch of free mods for Half-Life 2 using their Steam client. The most interesting one is a co-operative teamplay mod, called Synergy.

Players work in a single team against computer controlled enemies (the usual mix of combine troops, striders, zombies, etc), and push through the levels.

The game will work on the original levels from Half-Life 2 and episodes, but there are also a growing number of levels designed for the mod itself. These are quite fun, and include tasks and puzzles which require co-operation and co-ordination between team members.

It is quite nicely done, and there is a fair bit of fun in being part of a squad of the resistance, fighting against the evil combine hoards. And they do hoard!

Still, the mod has some shortcomings – the limited ammunition and weapons on most levels means that the game is a bit less co-operative than it could be, by rewarding people who charge in and grab everything first. This tends to leave a number of the team with nothing to do other than follow and wait for a team member to die so you can grab his weapons and bullets. The long respawn times tend to encourage this behaviour.

Also, there is no scoring or achievement system, like other mods and games based on the Source engine. Perhaps if players received a reward for team-play, instead of mult-solo-play, then the game could realise a new potential in multiplayer gaming.

The developers are active, though, and are continually working on improving the mod – so it will be interesting to see what they come up with over the next few months or so.

I’ve mostly finished setting up the NextGen Gallery by Alex Rabe, which is a pretty good album plugin for Word Press, and will let me publish photos easily on here.

I bought a Sony A200 D-SLR last week because it was on sale at about half the recommend retail price. It came with an 18-55mm and a 75-300mm lens, which made it a pretty good steal. After taking a large number of pictures of the inside of my house and then erasing them, I needed to go and find some real subjects.

So, what do you do when you have a new camera and want to give it a field-test? Well, I headed on up to Cleland Wildlife Park, which is up by Mt. Lofty. This was also a way to keep cool, as the temperature up at that height (500m or so) is typically about 5°C less than down on the flats, and Sunday was looking to be another warm day.

I had a pleasant walk, and had gotten there early enough to beat the crowds, who started arriving about lunchtime. This meant that I pretty much got the animals all to myself, and was able to get some great shots without having to spend a lot of time setting up.

This visit was mostly a brisk walkaround, just to see what was there and what I could get out of the camera. I plan to return again in the future (especially now that I have an annual pass – works out cheaper than three visits), and focus on certain animals there.

Anyway – the links for the new album/gallery:

• Photo Albums
• Cleland 2008-10-19 Gallery

I was pretty pleased with the results – although I’ve only posted about a third of the photographs I took. Some shots I would like to have another go at when I’m more used to the camera – for one thing, I need to relearn about setting apertures, ISO and shutter speeds, and all the rest. It’s been too long since I’ve had an SLR, and I relied mostly on auto for this shoot.

Even after I’d culled a number of shots from the original set I’d taken (I found that the auto-focus has an annoying habit of picking on the wrong object at times – like a blade of grass!), I had 1.2 GB of RAW photo data (I’m glad I bought the 4 GB card now – if only 2 hours of shooting would gain that many images). This caused a problem for me – I didn’t want to work on the images until I’d made sure that I’d saved the images onto read-only media (to prevent losing them from changes), but had no blank DVDs. In fact, until this evening I’ve never burnt a DVD before in my life (lots of CDs with albums on my shelves though).

So, I had to get DVDs and then find some software – I got this from SourceForge, which is typically my first stop for finding tools and applications. I downloaded the latest version of a tool called cdrtfe which is a flexible little program and can work with most CD and DVD formats – it is pretty well-ranked at SourceForge, which is a good indicator of a polished product. The only thing I had difficulty with was setting up the correct format for writing the files to DVD – but it didn’t let me start burning until I’d made the right choices, and it pointed me in the right direction for these.

I also had to get another application to view the RAW image files, as IrfanView, which has been my mainstay for the past few years, doesn’t support the Sony .arw format. Thankfully, the IrfanView support forum acknowledges this, and points you to FastStone, which is also free. I also find it to be a much better image browser/viewer, although I will still use IrfanView as a “quick editor”.

If you’re wondering – when I converted the RAW images to JPEG, I reduced the total filesize from 1.2 GB to only 24.5 MB! Although, I did resize the images considerably as well.

The more observant among you might have noticed a change in the the site.

Given the rather stalled status of the blog development for Horus Kol, I’ve decided to take something off the shelf which gave me access to the features I was after. I decided on WordPress, as I’d had a little experience with that when I trialled it for my Random Tweak site. I had also had a look a couple of other alternatives, such as b2evolution, but they were either lacking in functionality, or were a bit too nuts and bolts (yes, I’m a developer, and I eat nuts and bolts for breakfast, but I’d much rather be posting on a personal blog and developing something else rather than continually tweaking something from off the shelf).

So, here we are. Getting the template to work took all of about an afternoon, and that was starting from zero knowledge on how to do it. No doubt, I will be making adjustments and pasting patches on the paintwork over the next few weeks.

I have added a gallery plugin, which I still need to tweak before I start showing any pictures off, and I have also found a neat little map plugin, but I want to play with that first before I can see how it might be useful. All of that will have to wait, however, since I’m tired and I don’t want to be cranky at the office tomorrow.

A couple of years ago I found myself heavily involved in the Scouting WikiProject at WikiPedia and I was enjoying immensely. Not only was I helping to produce the articles on WikiPedia, I was learning a lot about Scouting and related topics from the research I was undertaking to provide the references for the myriad facts that contribute to the knowledge there.

Then life took a turn, as it does, and I ended up moving to Australia, and had to focus on other things for a while, so I became less active.

I figured I’d have a start again, and started to help the project again by tidying the wild bunch of UK Scouting articles, since they had only a handful of non-American contributors.

It was a very short time before I became extremely disabused of the idea that everyone is out to build a better knowledgebase.

It seems in the year or so between my activities on WikiPedia, there are a growing number of “editors” whose only substantive contributions are to mark anything they can get their hands on for deletion, and then bully the decision through despite the protests of the project members – not only in Scouting, but in many other topics around the site.

I know that I had marked some articles for deletion when I was active, and agreed with other recommendations for this – but mostly only after ensuring that the content was covered elsewhere in a more appropriate context. The new wave of deletionists don’t seem to care about information, just in a twisted wielding of power – simply deleting a photograph without offering an alternative, or speedy deleting an article (an often abused method of bypassing any discussion) without ensuring that relevant content was placed elsewhere as a subsection. And then these editors would accuse that project members were “biased”, instead of simply being more knowledgeable about the topic.

Added to that, and the US-centric fights were still going on over my break, as well. I had thought that we had sorted that out before I had left last time, and a large number of articles were becoming generalised where appropriate, and clearly marked as US-only for the other cases. A year later, and I was finding more and more articles discussing US-only Scouting as if it applied around the world.

My second (albeit short) stint collaborating with the project just didn’t light the fires of my interest to overcome these issues within the masses of contributors at WikiPedia.

I’m wondering if this is a universal problem, where other editors have just said “enough” – or if it is simply the fact that I had a large gap in my time there?

It’s a shame – because I really did enjoy that first time. But I guess I have enough of other things to do for now.

Yesterday was just like any other day. I woke up, showered, got my bike out and headed for the train station. I stepped on the train, got my book out, and tried to read it on the way into the city.

I couldn’t manage it.

The letters were dancing around, and obscured by something flashes around the bottom edge of my vision.

That’s when I knew I was going to get a migraine. I figured I would be okay as long as I took some painkillers in time – which sometimes works.

Migraines are not just "bad headaches"

By the time I got to the office, the flashes had cleared (which was fortunate, as they really are disorientating). I managed to get some painkillers, but it was too late – the migraine hit, and there is nothing that’s going to stop it.

Migraines vary from person to person – I’m pretty lucky that I only get a handful each year, whereas my father gets them a lot more frequently. But when I do get them, they are awful. Besides the pain, I also get extremely nauseous (sometimes to the point of vomiting). For some reason, I don’t get the light sensitivity that a lot of other sufferers get.

About all I can do once the migraine is in full swing is to sleep – so I excused myself and returned home, where I ended up sleeping for five hours and spent the rest of the day in a post-migraine fog (for some reason, a bunch of pain like that takes a lot out of me).

All in all, it wasn’t the worst migraine I’ve ever suffered, but not a pleasant experience.