Carleton Weather

I re-did the tab system and have it working now. The default tab to show is the current one and it doesnt freak out when you select a different type (daily/monthly/yearly) and loses what time frame was selected. After wrestling with that for most of the day, I started a document that gives an overview of the tab system and how to understand it in hopes of helping out people who want ot make changes to it a few years down the road. I’m going to be pulling some slightly longer days this week because I am not going to be here friday due to a coaching obligation.

-Will

I realized I hadn’t given an update in awhile, but I don’t have a whole lot to report – I’ve just been plowing through the Apple ][ data. The first part of the week was spent running various scripts on the text files to make them clean and tab-delimited for manipulation in Excel. The past three days I’ve been working on each month’s data in Excel, which has been slow-going. It’s getting a little faster as I get more clever about using functions to get what I want, but there’s still a lot to be done manually to each file. I’ve been adding each month to a master text file when I’m done with it. I also tested feeding the file into a mySQL table to make sure it’s all the way I want it, and that was successful, so hopefully that’s an indication that this somewhat tedious portion of the Apple ][ project will pay off!

-Katherine

Im working on a new way of doing the tab interface that should make it easier to play with settings like the default tab being displayed. I tried implementing a version on the almanac, but it wasnt quite done so I took it off and put the old one back. I’m heading out early to drive to Madison, so I will finish the rest of that monday.

-Will

Spent a chunk of the morning looking into the best way to add a past 24-hours plotting option. I did not know how to best approach this, and initially looked into a way for a button to change the values of the fields that were being submitted, but I did not find a clear solution to this. I can’t figure out any other ways, since I have to grab the desired fields for the plot type and what is being plotted. I set that aside and moved onto some of the other suggestions that Tom had. I switched the moon and recent conditions sections on the index page, and it looks better. I looked into whether or not the peak wind gust section had vanished, and everything that I have seems to suggest that it is there. For the rest of the day, I started cleaning little formatting and detail issues that I noticed, most notably the lack of a title for the almanac. Oh, I got the default display for the almanac working!

-Will

Finished going through and commenting the code today, cleaned some little stuff up while I was at it. I also got the moons working on the homepage, and added a footer to each page (which I will probably style differently at some point, but that was not too important for today). So, it’s looking pretty functional! I will figure out how to share it and send the link out so that people can test it out and give me feedback.

-Will

All the remaining floppies from Wednesday, as well as the ones Doug found yesterday, have been transferred to the Mac, and all .dsk files have been printed out to text files. I didn’t have any more disks that couldn’t be read by the Apple ][ today, or any .dsk files that couldn’t be read by the virtual disk drives on the Mac. I tried to re-transfer the three floppy disks that couldn’t be read on the Mac to see whether it would work on a second try, but the virtual drive still didn’t recognize them when they got there. The most baffling thing I discovered is that from halfway through the July 1994 up through the latest disk, for January 1996, almost every field on each disk lists a temperature of 195.6 degrees, and the other fields list either -17.1 degrees or a blank. I’m wondering whether these disks are the ones that need a special disk drive to read, although I would think they would just be unreadable as opposed to having wonky data if that were the case. Perhaps the monthly summaries that Doug found today will indicate whether these were always the temperatures recorded on those disks.

-Katherine

The plot page is all but finished, there is just a small issue with some parts of a table that contains the date adjustment links. All the heavy lifting is done, now it is just the small details. I spent some time cleaning up the code from the past week. Hooray!

-Will

Today was mainly spent transferring weather data – first from floppy disks on the Apple ][ to .dsk files on the mac via ADT, then from the .dsk files to .txt files via Virtual ii. There were fortunately only two floppies that the disk drive couldn’t read, and I was able to send the files from all of the rest over to the Mac. The .dsk to .txt process takes a bit longer, so I’m not quite through all of those yet. Of the 35 .dsk files I’ve tried to print to .txt files, the virtual disk drive has been unable to read 3. The rest have gone through fine, and hopefully those remaining will work as well.

-Katherine

The main problem we’ve run into so far as we’ve started transferring weather data to the Mac (besides the outside temperature for every field in November ’95 and January ’96 being 195.6 degrees fahrenheit, but there’s not much to do about that) is that in the extended monthly table printout, there is no date field, only a time field. Even if we assume that all the months start correctly on the first at 12:00AM and the program has the correct data for the correct times throughout the month, this will make for some extra work before we can add this data to the database. But Doug and I think that the weather program must know what the date for each data field is, as it can print out monthly summaries with averages for each day. We looked at the .DSK weather files to see whether we could find some indication of dates, but it’s all in crazy hex symbols or something like that. We tracked down an email for Byron Tracy, the Weather I.D.E.A.S. program developer, and Doug is going to email him to see whether he can tell us a faster and more reliable way to assign dates to our data fields.

-Katherine