In practical terms, this translates into something as efficient as an HID light running of lithium battery, and this is where my search for new lights has, until now, run into a major obstacle: the price tag. Not being able to shell out £400+, I just kept dreaming, and occasionally looking.

Behold, this autumn I stumbled on a new range of lights by an Australian company NiteFlux, offering an HID light for about half of the usual price. Still pretty dear, but going long way to convincing oneself that it is good deal.

Upon closer inspection of the NiteFlux site, I discovered that alongside the HID Arc, NiteFlux also do a top-notch LED light with a performance on par to that of the HID. After mulling it over for some time, and reading a gloating review in a Australian bike magazine, there were two factors that tipped the balance in favour of the LED (the price tag being exactly equal): comparative pictures of the light performance suggested that the LED light intensity is pretty even across the beam, while the HID intensity on the periphery of the beam seemed noticeably lesser; when riding with a single light, the peripheral lighting can make quite a difference to the overall effective range of the light. The second, and probably more weighty factor, were the power settings. On the full beam, there is not much between the two versions, the HID offering 2.5 hours and the LED 2.6 hours. However, the HID light has only two power modes, the lower being 7W providing 4.5 hours of riding. In contrast, the LED light has three modes, a 6W mode, providing 5.3 hours, and 3W providing whooping 10h runtime.

Well, I have been riding with the Photon Max for nearly two months now, and am truly impressed. What probably surprised me most, is the light output on the 3W setting. NiteFlux refer to 6W setting as more than adequate for riding around the town; that is a serious understatement of the light’s performance. In reality, the 3W setting is more than adequate for the town; indeed, I would go as far as to say that the 3W is adequate for non-technical off-roading, and that anything I am likely to ride, I can probably do on the 6W setting (far too bright and dazzling to ride with it in traffic); having the bright 12W beam is, of course, nice (it feels brighter and farther reaching than the dipped lights on my car!).

Having said that, I have two complaints. My first quibble concerns the design itself: in addition to the three steady power settings there is also a 3W flashing mode. This is entirely useless (even when riding about the town; the 3W is too bright to run it in a flashing mode), but more critically, the light power is controlled by a single switch, cycling through the four options, which means having to pass through the flashing mode when changing from 12W to 3W; this is extremely irritating, particularly as I often want to do this while riding at a fair pace.

My other complaint is to do with inadequate sealing of my unit. The lights are not meant to be watertight (fair enough), but are nevertheless sealed (essential for Scottish use). However, last week I managed to fall of the bike in a middle of a massive puddle (about a foot deep), and the lights got fair splashing over; when I got home later that night I noticed that there was condensation underneath the sealed lens. Having removed the plastic cover, I quickly discovered how the water got there — the power cable passes through a small hole in the alloy unit, and it is meant to be sealed with some silicon sealant; in my case the sealant was casually slapped on, not covering the the hole at all; it was easily remedied, but at the price tag, I would expect better. Other than that, the light seems pretty well made, and based on my experience with the Photon Max, I would certainly recommend it to anyone contemplating whether it is worth the price tag.

In unrelated news it became known that the UK government lost personal details of another 3,000,000 people, this time by exporting learner driver data to the US for processing. It’s been a while I have had to deal with the Data Protection Act, but I am pretty sure that exporting private data of UK residents to the US is prohibited under the Act because the US does not have sufficient (any?) data protection legislation (IIRC, the Act is accompanied by guidelines for data processors, in which this is explicitly spelled out), and if this is the case, then the data was lost not merely through incompetence, but because of the UK government broke the law to start with.

Web 2.0 … is basically a collection of random unspecified features written by 23-year-old goth acidheads at Netscape in 1995 [a funny and incisive post on Android]

… we at the OpenDocument Foundation have been displeased with the direction of ODF development this year. We find that ODF is not the open format with the open process we thought it was or originally intended it to be. … [it] does not adequately respect existing standards and does not address the market’s requirements for a single Universal Document Format with which any and all applications can work on an equal basis. [1]

It escapes me how anyone apart from those uninitiated to the word processing netherworld could have expected anything else from the mighty Re and his high priest. It all feels like an Indiana Jones sequel — I wonder, is the holy grail there to be found, or will we all just have to put up with our mortality?

P.S. If we all ask Santa nicely, we will find a universal file format in our stockings this festive season (if it does not turn up, it will be because were up to no good; Santa, as we all know, does not like that).

I would much recommend Kalymnos as a climbing destination for anyone leading a French 5 and above; the rock is excellent, as is the bolting standard (only came across one poorly bolted route during the week, called Hibiscus Market), and the routes are plentiful. We stayed at the Melina’s (also to be recommended) in Myrties, which is a bit further away from the cliffs than Massouri, but the main climbing area is pretty compact and it turned out to be of no real consequence (and for the further away places scooter / car can be rented in any case). Plenty of places to eat, and eat well; the Agean was probably the best place we ate at, but none of the other places we tried was anything but excellent. The locals are very friendly, helpful, and everyone seems to speak English.

Some observations. First of all on OpenGL programming for windows: in the year 2007 you only get a 1997 version of OpenGL (v1.1); probably not surprising, considering M$ investment in DirectX. Anyway, it makes no difference thanks to the nice idea behind the GLee library by Ben Woodhouse, which transparently handles the extension API for you — basically, you do #include <gl/glee.h> instead of #include <gl/gl.h>, add the (static) glee.lib to the linker command line, and then can use OpenGL API up to 2.2 plus any vendor extensions the HW might support (and it works on *nix, win32 and Mac OSX!).

Second, all *nix programmers should time from time be made to do something on windows, it makes you appreciate what a nice and powerful environment for software development *nix is (really, cmd.exe is a pathetic excuse for a shell, and any time you want do anything slightly more than trivial with MSVC, you end up using it and cursing it).

Third, as much as simple and integrated working on an established project with MSVC can be, and as much as unpleasant autofoo stuff is time from time, setting up even a quite small project in MSVC makes you realize that all that lovely GUI is in fact pretty unproductive when it comes to controlling project and sub-project settings — you end up having to go through endless combo boxes and all sorts of confirmation dialogues, thinking ‘this would be just a one line change in configure.ac’ (I reckon that half of the time it took to set up was spent clicking the GUI).

It would be nice to have some alternative build system for windows to the MSVC, like Dev-C++ + mingw project, if some felt like contributing it (or perhaps some truly hardcore autofoo hacker can manage to use the existing autofoo setup, who knows).

Once I got the necessary dependencies set up (mostly thanks to all the ready made packages provided by Tor Lillqvist, building clutter 0.4.2 using MSVC turned out quite straight-forward, and only a handful of modifications to the sources was needed; some tweaking is still needed to make the build process work out of the box, but you can expect the project files soon.

After few miles of a very graduate ascent came the gruelling climb up Mt Keen; managed to cycle a reasonable bit of it, but at the end there was nothing for it but to push. We did not go all the way to the top of the hill, but skirted some 180 meters below the summit level and started the fun descent into Glen Mark.

As it turned out, this descent came with a couple of mechanical hiccups for me. First, I have managed to get a classic pinch puncture near the start of the run, having mishandled a big rain water drain, and then I discovered at the bottom that my rear dérailleur cable snapped. I have managed a makeshift repair by shortening one section of the tubing, but unfortunately, the snapped cable was (unsurprisingly) frayed and so could not fed in cleanly into the last section of the tubing; as a result, I ended up with only tree gears (the second lowest and two above). This was far from ideal as we still had a rather substantial climb ahead of us, but as they say, better than a poke in the eye.

We continued to Auchronie and from there headed over the lower hillocks to Tarfside, aiming for the Firmouth Road beyond the Tampie hill. To make it more fun, we started heading up the wrong side of the river, necessitating fording it knee-deep higher up.

I am in a fairly good shape these days, but by then I was beginning to feel decidedly tired and the crippled derailleur was not helping either — the rise was not ultra steep, but steep enough to yearn that extra gear that should have been, but was not; eventually, I again had to resort to pushing. Tim and Tia were making frequent stops to consult the map at this point, which I suspect was to make me feel not so bad about them having to wait for me.

Then came some real fun, rough, but quite short descend, with some more technical climbing following; at this point my dérailleur saw some sense and decided to let me get up to the lowest gear (of course, by now the worst of the climbing was over!). And then came the long, fast, exciting ride down. I got a real fright at one point as I came around the corner and found Tia lying in the middle of the track not moving, her bike in the bushes; it seems one of her bar ends got caught on a juniper bush. Fortunately, she was unharmed and the rest of journey continued without disruption. We arrived at the cars after 7 hours of near constant riding (save the two repair breaks), having covered some 32 miles and more than 1200m of ascent — goes without saying, I was pretty knackered, left contemplating what it would take to ride the 75 miles of the Lochness 360 run in mere 9 hours as Tia did. Perhaps something to do next year …

P.S. Just noticed that Tim got some pictures from they day online