Wikinews talk:WeatherChecker

Please add an entry for the 1.5 changes (I'm not sure how the number in parenthesis to the right of the version number is generated).

I added comments in the commit that describe the changes.

— DV 17:31, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

New version installer is posted on the web site, changes added to the page. The version number comes from the binary itself — right-click on the file and look at the Version tab. It's in a format a.b.c.d where a and b are set in AssemblyInfo.cs, and c and d are automatically generated every time you rebuild. c is the number of days since January 1, 2000, and d is the number of seconds since midnight GMT, divided by two. -- IlyaHaykinson 21:02, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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v1.7 updated on the website, but note that the screenshot is quite sucky until capescience comes back up and I can take a better screenshot. -- IlyaHaykinson 02:43, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Amsterdam

Would it be possible to add Amsterdam and/or Brussels and/or Paramaribo to the map as these are the three capitals of the Dutch speaking countries. Amsterdam and Brussels would be a bit to close to eachother maybe .... But the area aroun Paramaribo is wide open on the map. Waerth 23:11, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I replied on Waerth's user talk page over on Dutch Wikinews. — DV 02:01, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Moscow

Would it be possible to add Moscow to the map of Europe? "Europe is bounded to the east by the Ural Mountains" (w:Europe). --195.225.128.43 16:27, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'm planning on posting a regional map of Asia in the next day or so, which will have Moscow on its westernmost edge.

However, I'll try decreasing the magnification used for the regional map for Europe a bit, and scooting the origin over a touch to the east, to include Moscow. However, if the decrease in magnification causes other cities to begin overlapping, such as London and Amsterdam, a tradeoff would then have to be made to either omit one of the cities that are too close to another, or back off of including Moscow in the regional map for the whole of Europe.

Here's another idea - how about two additional maps that subdivide the regional map for Europe into Western Europe and Eastern Europe? Moscow would appear in the Eastern Europe map, plus there would be the added benefit of London and Amsterdam not being so close to overlapping each other. These maps could also contain more cities. I would still continue to post the map for the entire European region as well - the Western and Eastern maps would serve as additional sub-regions to allow more detail.

— DV 16:52, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

WeatherChecker name

I'm afraid you have to consider a name change. WeatherChecker is already taken. See [1] and here [2]. Wcheck maybe ? --Leopard 18:33, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I can't speak for Ilya, but my sense is that he doesn't want to change the name unless there is a more serious objection.

I'm kinda on the fence about whether it's worth the bother.

By the way, the entry for "WeatherChecker", on the page pointed at by the first link, appears to be dead.

The second link points to a download for what appears to be a "redirect" app which sends users to a page on the commercial Weather.com web site after they enter a zip code.

According to Google, "Wcheck" is an even more common name, so I'm not sure we can use that one either.

Do you have any other creative ideas for the name?

— DV 07:02, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Legally, unless the name is a registered trademark, nothing is stopping anyone else from calling their application the same thing. I highly doubt that the mac applet in question is or would ever be a registered trademark. As the proper full name of the application we've been working on is "Wikinews WeatherChecker", I would not be too concerned. If someone has a brilliant name, it's a different story though. But renaming our source code and changing URLs for a minor app that hasn't been maintained for three years isn't something that's really important, in my opinion. -- IlyaHaykinson 10:19, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Some little problems

I appreciate your effort so far on this project, it's excellent work. But there are a few issues that are really bugging me about this project:

Thanks for the feedback. I replied to your comments inline... — DV 08:28, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• A user-based system is awkward and unwieldy.

Why not try a server-based automated system? It will save everyone the hassle of falling over each other to provide weather updates and shouldn't be too much of a processing load.

Unfortunately, the Wikimedia servers are overburdened as it is, and the MediaWiki software used on those servers for the Wiki projects is a delicate software environment for which it is quite involved to add any new features, no matter how small.

This state of affairs makes it unlikely that we will ever be able to convince the Wikimedia developers to agree to server-side controls to dynamically present the weather maps.

As for the hassle of providing updates, if it wasn't evident, no one is manually updating the weather anymore. Hourly weather map images are automatically generated and posted by a bot which runs on my local machine.

WeatherChecker resets a countdown timer after each report is posted, and repeats the hourly cycle unattended.

On the WeatherChecker client sites for all languages of Wikinews, the RC logs show WeatherChecker updates under the user name "WeatherBot".

The weather maps aren't consistently updated every hour of the day, 24 hours a day, because the Wikimedia servers are overburdened and not very reliable, often refusing the connection or timing out during busy periods of the day, so WeatherBot only runs for limited stretches of time without interruption.

When the Wikimedia servers refuse a connection or timeout, WeatherChecker must be manually shut down and restarted. Once I add an exception handler to WeatherChecker to allow it to recover and continue from these refused connections and timeouts, it should be able to run indefinitely. — DV 08:28, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Using .NET/C# is fairly questionable for a GPL project.

Even discarding the proprietary machinations behind .NET, C# doesn't have much of a following in Linux, or even on Windows systems that haven't downloaded the latest MS updates. Why not try something more accessible?

I agree with your point about supporting Linux. I'd also like to support Mac. If it's any consolation, the Mono project is porting .NET to these platforms.

I'm an old school C/C++ developer, but I didn't know enough about how to implement the networking aspects of this project, so I decided to learn C# in order to collaborate with Ilya Haykinson, who started the WeatherChecker project in that language.

I concentrate on the mapping and graphics rendering, which is my specialty.

My experience is in the shrink-wrap software industry, so I only know how to write apps for Windows and Mac. I have no idea how to write software with a graphical user interface for Linux. I'm not sure if Ilya would be interested in porting the networking code over to Linux, but perhaps he will chime in.

If you know someone who'd like to port WeatherChecker to Java, or some other cross-platform environment other than Java, I'd be happy to answer any questions they might have about the user interface, mapping, or graphics rendering while pursuing such a project. — DV 08:28, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• The program seems to be built from a US-centric perspective.

The program also gives way too much weight to the Fahrenheit scale. -20, 0, 32, 50, 72, 90, 100, 110, 120 may be a reasonable sequence in that scale, but the conversions of -29, -17, 0, 10 22 32 38 43 48 in Celsius are completely unacceptable, especially considering that this is the scale that the world actually uses. Also, it would apppear there's a bit of a SoCal bias in the temperature range. -20F is polar? Spend a winter in Minneapolis or Regina sometime. The scale should be recalibrated to give Celsius measurements authority (-40, -30, -20, -10, 0, 10, 20, 30, 40 if you want to keep nine different colours).

You're the first person to suggest a different set of intervals for the Celsius scale. I didn't realize that Celsius users were used to ten degree intervals. Isn't room temperature 22 degrees in Celsius? (It's 72 degrees in Fahrenheit.) There's no reason why the intervals used for the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales need to match one for one, so I'll be happy to change it if you think ten degree intervals are more commonly used. By the way, the BBC appears not to use ten degree intervals on their Celsius temperature scale - please see BBC Weather — DV 08:28, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The North America map is proof positive. Fargo is a data point instead of Winnipeg? Moosonee instead of Montreal? Why doesn't Toronto have a point? This leads me into my next point...

We can select from a large list of stations (representing cities) which report to NOAA. If you would like to help revise the selection of cities, please feel free to make more suggestions. If your favorite cities are available, and don't overlap other cities which are nearby, I will add them.

(Or, if you'd like to create a city selection using WeatherChecker yourself to see which cities are available and whether they overlap or not, please let me know and I will be happy to walk you through any installation and user issues.) — DV 08:28, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Data points appear to be inflexible.

The tool's usefulness as a standalone program are greatly diminished if it cannot mix and match different combinations of data points. Then again, people changing the data points from update to update adds another level of awkwardness to the piecemeal updating model.

The selection of cities/stations is not static. The selection is stored in an XML document which can be modified by WeatherChecker users on the fly, to incorporate requests as they come in. The code does not need to be modified to select different cities. — DV 08:28, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• The data itself is inflexible.

Temperatures are nice, but it might be nice to include current weather conditions at the data points. Maybe a cloud cover mosaic from satellite data?

We have much more data than temperature readings available - there is also cloud cover, wind speed, precipitation and other readings available for each station. I plan to enhance the maps to show sunny, cloudy, snowy, and other readings as soon as possible. Later on, I will add barometric pressure and wind speed if there is demand for it.

Overlaying cloud cover on the map is an interesting idea, but I'm still working on adding the cartographic projection support that would make it possible to import satellite images and conform them to the projections used to present the weather maps on Wikinews. I recently downloaded an impressive library of source code from USGS that was ported from Fortran to C for this purpose. — DV 08:28, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Please bear in mind this was entirely intended to be constructive-- some ideas for you to consider for future developments. Best Regards, Alexwcovington 14:20, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks again for your feedback. — DV 08:28, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Is there a way to add Guatemala or get a map of Guatemala by itself?

Regards

Regions

Hello! I do not know if there is still someone mantaining this porgram, but I would like to know if "Region Definition" screen works. I have tried to change the map into a new one by clicking and dragging the map but it did not work. Have I done something wrong or this function is not available. --SMP 17:43, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi. I don't believe that anyone maintains this program any longer. Sorry! -- IlyaHaykinson 17:50, 27 May 2006 (UTC)