Here’s the second batch of photos, I will add captions soon.
Here’s the first photo of the night. A couple of guys playing guitar hero in their finery.
The vast area requirements of the generators is the biggest problem with photovoltaic (solar) power systems. Hundreds of hectares of solar cells can only provide enough power for about 15,000 homes; an energy density easily surpassed by all other forms of electricity generators. Following closely behind is the issue of storage. The sun only shines on a given area of the earth for part of the day, excluding of course the extreme north and south of the world, where “days” lasting up to 6 months are followed by 6 months of darkness.
The solution, which is rapidly gaining support in the commercial market, is distributed solar power. These systems typically take one of two forms. Grid-connected photovoltaic arrays mounted on rooftops or on specially-constructed frames on private land, or self-contained units that are installed in devices with a rechargeable battery to power solely that device (typically lights.)
The need for storage, as well as the the issues with density call for careful consideration if solar power is ever to become a primary means of electricity generation. I believe the answer is to bring the two concepts of grid-connected arrays and self-contained units together, to create a true distributed solar power solution.
The current thinking with grid-connected systems is that the power required for the grid-connected home is first taken from the photovoltaic array mounted on the property. The surplus power is then pumped back into the grid. I propose taking a similar approach with self-contained appliances in public space. Imagine, if you will, a city where each street light is powered by a battery housed in the light itself. The light turns on at dusk and off at dawn, while the battery is charged throughout the day via solar power. When the battery is fully charged, a switch is triggered which causes the power generated by the light’s solar panel to be offloaded onto the grid.
Voltage drop would not be an issue, as the power would be offloaded onto the local grid. The only issues that may arise would be regulation of power output, however a similar system to the current grid-connected systems could be put in place.
The system as described here is only a supplemental measure, and obviously the light example is just that, an example that can be expanded to any public area, from awnings over public toilet blocks to sheds with roofs covered in photovoltaic cells, all of which are connected to the grid. Imagine a city where every house has a roof covered in solar cells, all supplying power to the grid where needed, with most public utilities supplying supplemental power as well. Without long-distance transmission lines, and a grid dependent on only a few points of supply, there would be a much more stable infrastructure, where a break in any number of lines, including the complete isolation of a suburb, would not cause an outage, but merely a slight drop in overall power supply for the affected area. When the sun sets, of course, they’ll be out of luck, but at least the street lights will be on! Distributed solar could account for up to 50% (in an ideal world) of our energy needs over the course of a year. The only barriers to it now are cost and infrastructure adaption, which hopefully will come sooner, rather than later.
Here is a composition of photos I took during the total lunar eclipse that occured on the 28th of August, 2007. These were taken from the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia over a period of about 2 hours.
These days we have at our fingertips the greatest single repository of human knowledge since the great library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt. Community websites like Wikipedia and various commercial ventures provide floods of information in detailed, lengthy articles, with every possible piece of data imaginable presented to the user at face value.
This torrent of information comes at a cost. With articles on certain topics running for pages on end, brevity and skillful writing are sacrificed in order to present information it its plainest, most easily accessible form. Statistics litter the pages, and convenient hyperlinks allow for explanations of certain terms to be spoon-fed to the reader in even simpler discourse. The consequence of this is that when people are confronted with an artice written in concise form, which relies on context to be interpeted and that, when interpreted correctly contains much valuable information, they are at a loss. Read the rest of this entry »
This will probably only interest a very few people, but hey! That’s what this blog is for! For me to broadcast my opinion to the world and to get a false sense of inflated self-worth by believing someone cares! 
Today I got my Stargate Iris piece that I bought at Supanova back from the framers. They did a great job. 
 Here’s a photo:
Anyway, after getting it home, I decided to hang it on the wall with my photo of the Southern Cross and the Pointers that I got a number of years ago at Parkes Observatory.
Next on the list of things to buy:Â Replicator blocks!
After hanging my new shiny, I was overcome by a desire to tidy up. So I spent the next three hours turning an absolute pile of chaos into this:
If you’d seen what it was like before, you wouldn’t believe it was the same room.
As usual, pictures at the end.Â
The first thing that anyone going to Supanova thinks of is the line. The line on the Saturday is indescribably long, and if you want to walk from one end to the other, you’ll want a packed lunch and more than one bottle of water. In fact, if you can get your hands on a camel, you’re probably almost ready to make the trek. Every year, there is at least one person who does it right, and I am incredibly envious of their foresight and planning. See exhibit A:
How to wait in line.
Unfortunately, the number of people that organised is low. See exhibit B:
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How everyone else waited in line.
If you just want to check out the gallery of photos I took, go straight to the end, otherwise, read on!
I was late to the opening day of the Supanova Pop Culture Expo in Brisbane this year, however that pales into insignificance when you consider how close I was to not going altogether! It was only on the Friday morning that the money I needed to buy my tickets came in, and even then I only had about $200 to spend the entire weekend. Either way, I got my tickets, did a solid day’s work and then went up as soon as I could.
Due to the size of the expo last year, they kicked off proceedings at 1PM instead of 6, and due to work, I was unable to make it up there until about 5:30. The good thing about this was being able to miss the queue for picking up my tickets. The bad thing was that the main hall was almost empty, with most people going over to the preview night.
The Fantastic Bar Staff
As I’m sure many people know, today the Mana Bar was officially opened to the public. People started lining up at 9AM, and by the time 12 noon rolled around, which was the time I rocked up, the line was already about 75 people long. There was one common feeling: Anticipation. At the head of the line were Mario, Waluigi, Wario, Princess Peach and Princess Daisy, while the Little Sister patrolled up and down the line, looking sinister. More pictures and the full review after the jump!
Recently, I was installing an image gallery module for the Drupal CMS on another website I assist with. Said image gallery module has a jolly good automatic image resizing function, which, according to the advertising, shrinks images that are larger than the maximum size you set in the admin panel.
A reasonable person would believe that it would do just that, and that if you didn’t want to have your images resized, you could simply set an enormous size as the maximum, and the script would never bother to resize your images, or at least would push them out at the same size that they went in at.
A reasonable person would, in this situation, be wrong. (Protip: If you want to be right, don’t believe anyone and be as unreasonable as possible.)
After setting the maximum size to 10,000 pixels on the longest side, all of my images broke. Whenever I tried to access them (because the resizing was done on-the-fly, not when the images were added, but that’s a story for another day) I would get a “memory limit exceeded” error message. My initial thought was “so what did the silly fellow that wrote this do for it to be so tragically bad?” Because it was absolutely unthinkable that I had done anything wrong, of course. Sure enough, rather than doing the smart thing, and checking to see if the image required resizing, and then skipping the processing if it didn’t, the script jumped right into resizing the images using the maximum size I set, trying to scale up all of my nice 1,000×700 images to 10,000×7000 pixel monsters.
Sir Blurrykins is not impressed.
This was jolly rude of it, and I proceeded to open the faithful Notepad++ and inspected the image resizing function.
Surprisingly, the size of the source picture was detected not once, but twice! Not only that, but the most thorough programmer stored the values in completely different variables each time, so that there was no chance of it being a failsafe! Unfortunately, nothing was ever done with the data, instead the numbers passed to the script were used blindly to resize the picture. The addition of a single if statement solved all my problems.
if ($imgsize[0] > $imgw || $imgsize[1] > $imgh)
{
# Resize the image
}
So, fellow developers, next time you are creating code that is meant to do one thing in a very specific case, make sure that it actually has to be done, first. Because otherwise, frankly, it makes my life difficult.