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Sunday, August 24. 2008
Skip lives in Florida, south of Tampa Bay. I asked him about the storm damage and he said he had been away. "We had prepped our place for a hurricane/tropical storm, so everything was fine here. I checked my rain gauge on returning home. A mere 2.6 inches of rain. Not even one palm frond blow off the trees."
Very nice to hear!
We have mostly had below average temperature, and fairly low humidity the last couple of weeks. The only spoiler is the lack of rain. This is nice for outdoor activities, but usually means fewer visits on the weather page. I also noticed something odd. Thursday I checked the web logs, and of 17 visits, 10 were from other countries! I checked again today, and of 12 visits, 8 were from other countries. I don't mind, but I have to wonder why they visit? I did see 2 from China on Thursday, so perhaps it was a local viewer, visiting the games?
I have restored most of the files that I lost from the crash. I cannot get my picture files, but I hope to get them after I replace the motherboard. It did get me to thinking about the home page. It does show the last time the current conditions were updated, but it is easy to miss if they are not being updated. I had an idea of a way to point out if the data is not up to date, but I wanted to wait until I could get the notes and files off the crashed computer. Someone else was interested in this, so Ken True wrote a short script to check the update time. I don't know if Ken added it to his site, so email me if you want a copy. I added it to the home page, but it only shows up if the data is not being updated.
Saturday, August 9. 2008
The resident computer idiot, that would be me, fried one of the weather computers. The good news is, most of the web site is refreshed by the other computer. The State College GR3 radar is down, but the Dover radar is still being updated. The WXSIM forecast will not be updated, and the Backyard Birder blog will not be updated. I'm guessing, it'll be about a week and a half until I can get everything online. All of my development notes for the weather station, as well as the database for the bird blog are inaccessible now. I think that I will be able to recover all the files, I sure hope so.
I updated Weather Display Live to the latest version. It looks pretty much the same, but Julian said there were a ton of bug fixes. The main difference is, he added a GUI for arranging the items on the screen. Before I had to type the coordinates into the config file, then upload it and see how it looked. This is a big improvement!
MCHALLIS created a contact form that I liked, so I added it to the web site. Download links:
Required library:(this has to also be installed)
http://www.carmosaic.com/weather/scripts/captcha-secureimage.zip
Contact Form (see readme.txt inside the zip for full instructions):
http://www.carmosaic.com/weather/scripts/contact-form.zip
Find the link to mine in the information column, on the home page, or go here.
Thursday, July 24. 2008
I was not going to watch the Tour De France this year because, they made it clear, they do not want an American to win! But I am anyway. That pretty much takes up any of my free time. I did manage to put time into the Flash Charts, and I have built all the ones that I planned. I still have to organize them, and pretty things up. You can view them here. I will keep the jpgraphs that I have now, but I will delete them from the menu. If you prefer the graphs, bookmark them now!
I recently rebalanced the weather station and rain gage. We had a few storms since then, so I was able to compare the weather station rain reading, to the four inch volume style rain gage. The four inch gage showed .26", and the weather station .25". The next storm the four inch had .76 and the weather station .75". It is odd that the station was low by .01 both times! I won't make any changes now, because those are within spec, but I will keep an eye on it, and if they continue to track low, I will adjust it.
I noticed on the home page that, the past hour rain was not working correctly. When I checked into it, I discovered that it was getting it's data from a file that only updates every ten minutes. Not only that, but it was not set to update with the ajax routine. When I first added the ajax updates, I did not know that you could use two separate data files. I now use two, and I have added the past hour rain to the custom file. It should now update every ten seconds.
Rick from ricksturf.com has created a page to view the NOAA storm report. I thought it was a worthwhile addition, so I added it to my site. View it here.
Wednesday, July 16. 2008
Weather Underground appeared to be offline yesterday. Early reports said that it was a DNS error. they said, it could take up to 48 hours for the name servers to clear their cache. Today their radar reappeared on my site, and now everything seems OK. Here is a statement from Toby Skinner, Director of Marketing for Weather Underground:
"The problems were caused when someone at our domain name registrar inadvertently made a change to our domain name record. This essentially means that in the yellow pages of the Internet, they got our address wrong. Most people were left unable to the find our site and were instead presented with our registrar's default page."
Monday, July 7. 2008
Today was my first day back to work after my two week vacation. The temperature wasn't too bad, but the dew point was very sticky! It wouldn't matter, but I do not work in air conditioning. Oh well, it could be worse... like tomorrow is supposed to be. 
I had a to do list for the vacation, and working on the Open Flash Charts was high on my list. Unfortunately, I did not get many of them finished. I am basing these on the charts and JP Graph pages made by Pinto. His Open Flash tutorial is here.
When I made my JP Graph page, I couldn't get all the graphs to load on the same page. Some would load, others had a little red 'x'. If you right clicked on the "x" and selected to view the image, it appeared. I pretty much figured that it was a limit on my web server. I got around that problem by only showing two or three at a time, using javascript. Thing is, when I view some graph pages my eyes gloss over, it is too much to take in at once. I did not even try to put these all on one page.
When I started on these charts, I went with an easy way to make them user selectable, without javascript. You only see one at a time for now. I might change that later, and I will at least try to order them better.
This is a work in progress, so one or more might be broken, but if you wish to see how they are coming along, you can take a peek here.
Monday, June 30. 2008
Well, after spending time to get the Wasp2 animation working, I decided to go back to a static image. We had a few cells move through this week, and watching the animation, waiting for it to show the latest, was sort of trying. Also, I was less than thrilled with what Wasp2 was showing. It didn't have hardly any of the strikes that I was registering.
300 Member Stations
There are presently eleven weather networks in the US, and five more internationals. We just hit 300 member stations! If you wish to see your local network, go to the national site, NAWN. Please visit your local network, and if you have a personal weather station, please sign up!
Vantage Pro2 Problem Update
After I replaced the battery and solar panel, I was getting a low battery warning. I checked the obvious things, looked for corrosion, made sure the solar panel was connected securely, but I didn't see anything wrong. I figured, I was going to have to contact Davis and have the thing repaired. Davis says they have a two week turn around. Well that's just great! It will take a few days to get there, two weeks for them to fix it, and then a few more days to get back here. I did the only sensible thing, I bought another ISS from Ambient! Oddly, while I was waiting for the ISS to show up, the low battery warning cleared, and it was reporting that the battery was OK. Oh well, I have the back up ISS, so if I do need to send it back, and I still might, the station won't have to go down.
Tuesday, June 24. 2008
I added the WASP2 image to the lightning page. WASP2 is a program that uses the data from other Boltek / Stormtracker users, to better plot the strike locations. Right now I have it uploading every ten minutes, but I believe I saw a way to optimize the uploads on the Weather Display forum. If I get that worked out, I will update this entry.
edit OK, what I was thinking of was for a one wire setup, not for Stormtracker.
I have the animation working now, it uses javascript.
Sunday, June 22. 2008
My vacation has started! I have a lot of work planned to do over the course of the next two weeks, so I thought I would take care of the important stuff first! Namely, the weather station. I replaced the daytime fan and solar panel. I am really hoping that the new solar panel will fix the battery dying early problem. Also, while I had it off the pole, I decided to replace the tripod with a single pole. The four inch rain gage was mounted on a separate post, I mounted that on the back of the weather station. It will be much nicer to mow around, now.
I saw an interesting discussion about buying from Provantage vs. Ambient. Provantage has a NO RETURN policy. If something arrives DOA, you have to deal with the manufacturer, because Provantage will do nothing for you. I was lucky when I bought my Boltek. Ambient had a lower price than Provantage, so I bought from them. That is usually not the case.
I still did not install Windows XP. I tried to create a new partition to install it on, and I failed. I believe it was because I have a SATA hard drive. In any event, it was going to be too small anyway, so I decided to buy a new hard drive and start fresh. Since this computer came with Vista installed, I had to download the XP drivers before I can install it. What a PITA! I do not recommend doing this, if you do not have the time and patience to complete it. You will simply have to get used to all the many problems with Vista..
Monday, June 16. 2008
If you have read this blog for awhile, you may know that I am no fan of Windows Vista! I have finally reached my limit! I have GR Level 3 radar running on two computers. The XP machine runs for weeks at a time with no problem. The Vista machine is lucky to make it three days in a row. I have researched the problem on the GR LevelX forums, and all they say is to turn off all screen savers and power management. This I have done, repeatedly! Vista seems to have a mind of it's own. I have some folders sorted by Date Modified. They will be sorted with this setting for a few days, then the folders will mysteriously switch to sort by Name. If I right click to sort by Date Modified, that option will not even be in the menu! So I bought a license for Win XP. Maybe Microsoft's New OS will be better than Vista, it sure couldn't be much worse.
Sunday, June 8. 2008
I was looking for alternatives for the MAWN buoy page. I found another Google Gadget for an alternative. It isn't as cool as Ken True's script, but it does show all the info. Unfortunately, I could re-size it the way I would have liked, so it seems a bit condensed. If you wish to add it to your page, go to the Google Gadget page.
The Boltek / StormTracker is working well. I am uploading the data to the Strike Star network. When I first signed up a few days ago, I checked to see my rating. My data was rated as Very Poor, but I figured that it was because I had just started the feed. The next night I looked at it and it was rated as medium, and now it is at the Very High level. As long as it continues to upload, the rating should climb.
Sunday, June 1. 2008
I found a really cool radar map. It uses Google Maps and the Weather Channel radar. I put up a radar map of Pennsylvania here. I also created one for the Mid-Atlantic Weather Network. If you have a web site, you can go here to create one for your site.
I am pleased to say that, the Boltek does not report false strikes. I put up my lightning page here. Since I installed the detector, I tracked several storms headed this way. The first one caught me off guard. I figured that it was reporting false strikes, but then I checked the radar page and realized, there is a storm coming! The only problem is, I have a blind spot to the North. I considered moving the antenna to the mast with the anemometer. The problem is, during a storm that tends to sway a bit. That would mean a huge difference in where it reports the strikes. Another option would be to move it to the rooftop. That is doable, but would take some planning. I could always just say, it is good enough as is! I like that option!
Friday, May 23. 2008
steve26, on Weather-Watch.com, has written a client raw parser. This is invaluable when troubleshooting various PHP scripts. It will show all the data that Weather Display is uploading in the three client Raw files. I uploaded it to my web site, see it in action here.
I hope to make use of that parser when I'm working on the Flash Chart scripts. I plan to get to them during my vacation at the end of June.
This week I was working on a meso-buoy script for the Mid-Atlantic Weather Network. This only covers the southern half of the network, because there is a page that covers the northern half. My page might not make the cut, but you can see the test page here. These are based on Ken True's work.
OK, I know this might be a very bad idea, but I bought a Boltek lightning card. It is an excellent system, but the reason I say it might be a bad idea is, I tried a one wire lightning detector, and I got a bazillion false strikes. I am told that the Boltek can filter out noise, so I am going to give it a try. It is a bit pricey, so I will be seriously unhappy, if it does not!
Thursday, May 15. 2008
No sooner did the Northeastern Weather Network get off the ground ,and Horsham asked, 'is Pa really part of the Northeast?'. So He started the Mid-Atlantic Weather Network. As of now, New Holland, Pa Weather is a member of both networks. Visit the forum for more info. See my MAWN page here.
If you have a personal weather station, using Weather Display, or VWS, and you live in Pa, Nj, De, Va, West Va, the Carolinas, or North Georgia, please visit the forum and sign up!
Sunday, May 11. 2008
I liked the "Comfort Level" that Horsham Weather uses to describe the current conditions. I found a couple of versions, but I think MCHALLIS' is the one to use. Pinto had a version / hand in it, and Ken True added it to the Multilingual template. MCHALLIS started out using the comfort levels in Weather Display, but found there were 4 levels in the humidex "Degree of Comfort", where Weather Display uses 5. So he went with the 'official' humidity index from Canada.
I put my version of MCHALLIS' script on the home page, but I was not happy with some of the settings. I felt that temperature readings between 68 and 78 should be 'comfortable' whether it is windy or humid. I was going to go with 68 to 80, but I wasn't sure; If it is 80 degrees and very, very humid, is it still comfortable? This script uses humidity index, which I am not familiar with. I will have to tweak the temp / humidity / wind chill settings, as they come up. The new Heat Color Word appears under the thermometer on the right hand side of the home page.
edit - I forgot about scope in PHP, so the initial Heat Color Word was always showing, cool. In reworking it, I realized that I had defined the feels like temperature, and it would be better to use that. Now it is in Fahrenheit, and doesn't use humidity index. If I don't like the settings, it is easy to tweak.
Weather Sticker
I send pictures and data to Weather Underground, and they provide me with radar and a map for the advisories. Recently they have been sending out letters to any personal weather web site with the phrase, "weather sticker". Turns out that they have a patent on that phrase. That is insane. I had been using a weather sticker banner since I first started using Weather Display. Anole, the author of the script, had been contacted and told to change the name, or else. So he renamed it, Weather Graphic. I have both the original and the new scripts on my site. I used Google to search my site for that phrase, but I came up clean. If I had it on my site, and WU sent me a letter about it, I would not hesitae to sevor all ties with them. I have GR Level 3 radar on my site, and I could lose the advisoriy map without any poroblem. This is a very bad move by Weather Underground.
Tuesday, May 6. 2008
Monday night I was on a weather forum, and saw a post from someone that was using my web cam image. I thought, WT...? I didn't know this person, and had no knowledge of him using my web cam images. It wasn't until the next day, when I checked the forum from work, that I finally realized what was happening. The image did not show up there, so I right clicked and selected 'properties', to see why. Turned out, he used his local network address for the web cam, which is not accessible to the public. One of my web cams was configured exactly the same, so when I viewed it at home, my cam showed up in his post. He saw his web cam, so he had no idea that no one else could see it. Wow!
With the exception of spammers, everyone that I have been in contact with since I started uploading my weather data, has been friendly and or helpful. I was really glad that this guy did not break the mold.
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