Carleton Weather

This morning I finished a draft of my “imitation” of the current weather site. I have all the pages except for plotting and the almanac rewritten using CSS and while there are some little style things I can adjust, it’s all there. The biggest part of this transition was making sure that the HTML content has a logical structure. Using lots of <div> tags with ids attached to them, we can go in and basically manipulate the pages in any way that we want using CSS. Its pretty cool! I spent the rest of the day doing some really basic layout sketches and jotting down some notes about what the site might look like down the road. I also did some follow ups about server vs. client side graphing this morning, and I don’t know if we necessarily want to switch given the amount of traffic we get (I’m making some assumptions), but it probably would not be too bad of a switch, but regardless each side has its pros and cons.

-Will

Looked through all of the graphing and plotting scripts today, and I think I have found the ones that are currently being used. Overall, they are easy to understand once you give them a thorough read, and I don’t know how much (or at all) we will want to change them unless we really want a drastically different functionality. Spent the rest of the day looking through the website thinking about what changes could possibly be made and also beggining some transfers over to my test site. My number one thought is that we might want to just update the look and feel of the site. Some of the graphics are outdated, and some layout aspects could probably be improved.

-Will

Spent today working on my little draft of the site. I basically have all the non-mySql reliant pages up and running with images and everything. It’s basically what I had a week ago, but this time done with CSS. Tomorrow I am going to spend some time dissecting the graphing scripts to get a sense of what is going on and if it would make sense to change the way we make them.

-Will

Yesterday’s big excitement was getting the Apple II up and running. The final working setup is the Apple II computer, the monochrome Zenith monitor, and the connected 5.25″ disk drives and Epson MX80 printer, both of which were originally hooked up to the Apple IIe (though we kept the Grappler interface chip for the printer that was already in the Apple II). The Weather program only prompts us to use one drive, so it is still unclear whether both of the individual disk drives are working. Once we hooked the old printer up, we got it to print out a monthly summary for October 1990 and all the data points for a couple of hours on October 31st – it took a bit to get the ink going and the paper got a little jammed, but it worked, and it was incredibly cool. So now we know the program still works and the data is still preserved on at least one and hopefully all of the disks, and that it can be sent to a printer.

The next question, which I spent the last hour yesterday and most of today so far researching, is whether we can instead hook the Apple II up to the parallel port on a PC and input the data that the Apple II sends onto the newer system. From the many different web pages I’ve read, it sounds like it can be done, though different sites say different things regarding the ease with which it can be accomplished, what kind of software and hardware requirements there are, how much information the parallel port can take in at once, etc. Most of what I’ve read is also pretty vague. For example, this site talks mostly about the port itself and the hardware involved in inputting a byte, and this is one of a number of sites I found that talks about using specific software for digital input from the parallel port. It’s hard to tell how relevant any of this is to us. I’m now moving on to either a CSS form for the weather site as viewed from a smartphone or creating a weather site app until Tom and Doug return next week to help investigate this issue.

-Katherine

Spent the morning researching client vs. server side code. Javascript is one of the main client side languages while PHP is one of the main server-side languages. I poked around the current graphing scripts quickly and I think we may currently be doing it on the server side with PHP. I started looking into various Javascript graphing options, and the most recommended one was High Charts, which would be free for us to use. I also did some more work with tooltips, which was pretty straightforward. In the afternoon, we got the Apple II up and running, and finally got it to print! Wowzers!

-Will

I spent the first half of the day discovering that very few people on the internet seem to be interested in transferring information from 5.25″ floppy disks to modern computers in 2011, and that even fewer people have the necessary equipment to do it, or even know how.  The most informative site I could find claimed the best option is to perform a NULL modem transfer with telecom programs, which it elaborates on here andhere. Another article discusses a software package called macADT which facilitates information transfer between Apple II and Macs via serial ports and modems.

After our meeting with Dave Musicant, I started copying the rawdata table to a warehouse table and adding indexing. I created an index for both the temperature and month fields in the warehouse table, and then performed a number of queries on both tables. The results of these tests were inconsistent, with the indexed table only performing more quickly on certain queries. Using the “explain” command on one such query indicated that the indexing was in fact being used in the search, so I’m confused as to why the indexed table wouldn’t perform better. I’ll have to investigate this issue further tomorrow.

-Katherine

After I rolled in at 8, I did a little more playing around with CSS until our meeting at 9. For the rest of the morning, I started investigating ways to have text pop up when you mouse over a term that we want to display more info on. I found two ways to do this, one with CSS and another using JavaScript. I got the css one up and running, but spent a good chunk of time reading up on JavaScript tools that can accomplish this. The most widely used one seems to be a part of the Jquery library called JTools. I havent gotten this to work yet, so I dont really have a sense of how useful it will actually be. My preliminary assessment is that it really just allows for some effects and an easier way to do color-complicated tooltips (those popup things), but I am not sure. My javascript skills are lacking which is why it is taking me so long. The meeting we had with Dave Musicant was helpful in getting a better idea of where we are heading down the road as far as data organization.

-Will

Spent the entire day learning more about CSS and started to apply it to my site design. I re-wrote a bunch of code to make it more CSS controllable. It’s tricky to learn and I’m by no means a pro-designer so everything still looks fairly basic.

-Will

Spent most of today writing my own version of the current site. I currently have a working homepage that displays the last data that was taken before the site was frozen and copied, along with the history and setup pages. I made a super cool menu bar which I put at the top of every page. It was a little tricky to get all the styling all right, but it feels good to have something done! I intend for it to be a draft that we can play around with and see how new or improved features will fit in the grand scheme.

-Will