WxPDA - SM (Smart Phone Edition)

I am now testing a version of WxPDA for the Smart Phone. This has taken some effort since the Smart Phone does not have a touch screen. All of the options have to be made into menus or something that can be selected with the up/down, left/right, and enter keys.



More to follow as testing progresses.

Getting your time settings

I still get a couple of emails from users regarding time issues when we transition our clocks for daylight savings. Users continue to run into problems with the changes to the starting and stopping dates for daylight savings time. The following VB script has been very helpful in resolving issues. I found this script on the Internet.

On Error Resume Next
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ &
"{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_TimeZone")
For Each objItem in colItems
Wscript.Echo "Bias: " & objItem.Bias
Wscript.Echo "Caption: " & objItem.Caption
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Bias: " &
objItem.DaylightBias
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Day: " &
objItem.DaylightDay
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Day of Week: " &
objItem.DaylightDayOfWeek
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Hour: " &
objItem.DaylightHour
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Millisecond: " &
objItem.DaylightMillisecond
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Minute: " &
objItem.DaylightMinute
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Month: " &
objItem.DaylightMonth
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Name: " &
objItem.DaylightName
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Second:
" & objItem.DaylightSecond
Wscript.Echo "Daylight Year: " &
objItem.DaylightYear
Wscript.Echo "Description: " &
objItem.Description
Wscript.Echo "Setting ID: " &
objItem.SettingID
Wscript.Echo "Standard Bias: " &
objItem.StandardBias
Wscript.Echo "Standard Day: " &
objItem.StandardDay
Wscript.Echo "Standard Day of Week: " &
objItem.StandardDayOfWeek
Wscript.Echo "Standard Hour: " &
objItem.StandardHour
Wscript.Echo "Standard Millisecond: " &
objItem.StandardMillisecond
Wscript.Echo "Standard Minute: " &
objItem.StandardMinute
Wscript.Echo "Standard Month: " &
objItem.StandardMonth
Wscript.Echo "Standard Name: " &
objItem.StandardName
Wscript.Echo "Standard Second: " &
objItem.StandardSecond
Wscript.Echo "Standard Year: " &
objItem.StandardYear
Wscript.EchoNext

You can save this to time.vbs and run it on your computer with the command "cscript time.vbs"

Queuing Sounds

A user recently asked about sounds interrupting the currently playing sound. That does occur in the Message and Map clients. If the play once option is selected, the program may start a second sound before the first one has completed. This is due to the fact that the program does not know when the first sound completes.

I will look into adding an option to queue the sounds in the order that they are generated.

Weather Message 3.3 Refreshed

I have refreshed the Weather Message 3.3 public release with a revised WxMap. A user identified a problem in WxMap that caused it to crash. WxMap would report an object not set error if the Refresh Map option was clicked when the zone map had not been loaded/installed.

By default, the zone map is not installed. Because of this, it was necessary to correct the public 3.3 release.

Weather Message 3.3 Released

I have spent most of the afternoon getting 3.3 ready and posted on the website. I will start looking at changes for version 3.4 later in the week.

HTC 6800 Smart Phone

The company that I work for during the day has provided me with a HTC 6800 Smart Phone. This PDA / Phone has windows mobile 6 installed. I have been using the WxPda application to monitor the weather.

My plan has unlimited internet access so this will allow me to experiment with additional weather related applications. (I sure would like a program to download radar to the pda)

Version 3.3 Status

I think I am about ready to release version 3.3. I will try to post the last beta this week. I have been fixing some issues in the retransmission software and that has held up this beta.

Emwin Low Priority Backlog

A user reported that some products seemed to be arriving late. I checked and confirmed that some low priority products were being delayed for about 50 minutes. A quick note to the EMWIN operators at NWS HQ confirmed that this was the case.

At the beginning of the month there are a number of one time products that are low priority. They cause all low priority products to backup. They have made some additional adjustments to help with this situation.

Local User Settings

Microsoft is now encouraging developers to store program settings on a per user basis. This has alot to do with changes in Windows Vista. Presently Weather Message has one set of settings for the entire program. This is not much of an issue for the server as those settings are global. It is more of a issue for the clients.

The client program settings apply to all users (Message Client and Map Client). This includes the position on the screen. If multiple people use the same computer, they cannot configure the clients for their own preferences. This applies to a single computer or a terminal services connection.

The original thought was to make it easy for the administrators. You set up the program and no changes are required by the user. A simple ini file can be copied from computer to computer with the client settings. I will note that in some installations it is not desirable to have users making changes.

Regardless, I am considering the possibilities here.

WxScheduler

A user was trying to create a schedule item that would process a file on the 1st Tuesday of each month. I thought the program would already do that, but the Week of Month required that the Tuesday occur on that week. Some months do not have a Tuesday on the first week of the month. Well may of the first weeks of a month do not have all of the days.

I have changed the scheduler so that it will check to see if the user has specified a week of month and a day of week. If they are both entered, the program will see this as a request for the Xth occurance of the specified day of week for a month.

This should fix the users problem and provide some new capability.

Weather Message 3.3 Beta 7

Weather Message 3.3 Beta 7 has been uploaded to the beta website. This release has changes to address User Account Control compatibility with Windows Vista. I have not had a chance to test these changes on a Vista computer, will do so this week.

Group2Call Free Voice Messaging

Group2Call is now providing free voice messaging with ad support. If you use this service, each voice message will have a short ad at the end of the message. If you are interested in this service send an email to Alan at info@group2call.com.

Regular Expression Support

I have completed the changes to add support for Regular Expressions in the text match and text exclude routines. Users now have an option to indicate if the expression entered in the Match or Exclude field is a regular expression.

The current matching mechanism is very efficient. It however does not allow for multiple match criteria or complex matching expressions. These can be accomplished with regular expressions. Regular expressions should only be used when needed since they require considerably more cpu cycles than the default matching mechanism.

Here is an example regular expression: (.BMX.)(.MOB.)(.HUN.)

This means match .BMX. or .MOB. or .HUN. in the received message.

Winter Weather Simplification - Open Letter to NWS

To: ELLIOTT.JACKS@NOAA.GOV

Sirs,

I am writing in regards the Proposed Winter Weather Simplification changes. I do not want to see the NWS adopt these changes. The NWS has spent a great deal of time and money to implement VTEC. Vendors and users have also gone to a great deal of effort to use VTEC. This change will put us back where we were before VTEC was implemented.

VTEC has allowed users of NWS products to provide automatic notifications based on the type of weather coded in the VTEC line. This change would make the Winter Storm product generic again for some weather types. If this change is approved we would have a generic “winter weather” coding, with the details in the text. Decoding the text is a problem that was fixed with VTEC. We again will be stuck with the difficult task of trying to determine what kind of “winter weather” is associated with the product.

Many of us have welcomed VTEC because it provides a reliable standardized way to represent the actual weather conditions being issued. Moving from specific weather phenomena to generic phenomena is taking a step backwards.

I respectfully request that this change not be implemented.

Best Regards,

Danny Lloyd
Weather Message

Weather Message 3.3 Beta 6

I have posted Weather Message 3.3 Beta 6. This release contains several bug fixes and some enhancements to the WxPort program.

I am looking at releasing version 3.3 due to several bug fixes in the program. I will evaluate it over the next week and decide a release date.

Note: Beta 6 changes the image communication data stream to the Message Client. Clients will have to be updated to Beta 6 in order to continue to receive images.

Weather Brains

Weather Message will have an advertisement on the Weather Brains webcast. The advertisement will run from February 4th through March 10th. Weather Message will be mentioned at the beginning and end of the webcast. Vist the Weather Brains webpage at http://www.weatherbrains.com/

I have been friends with some of the Weather Brains guys for years because of our interest in amateur radio: James Spann, WO4W; Brian Peters, WD4EPR; and David Black KB4KCH. When I started writing weather related software, they encouraged my endeavor.

If you are interested in weather, you might want to check out their weekly webcast. I am sure you will find their discussions interesting.

EMWIN Installation

While I was taking pictures, I went ahead and took pictures of the EMWIN dish. This is a Zephyrus system using the WX-13m receiver. The dish is side mounted to my free-standing tower.

NoaaPort Installation

Here are some pictures of my NoaaPort installation. The pictures show a 10 foot dish that I picked up for free. I am using a Norsat 8515 500 Khz. 15° Professional LNB with a Chaparral feedhorn. The receiver is a Novra S75.

WxPort

I have made several changes to WxPort, the NoaaPort ingest program. It can now ingest all 4 NWS datastreams. I have also identified several problems that have not been discovered by other users.

I have a test program that will decode the gini data (satellite images). I will be refining it further.

I will try to post some images of my installation tomorrow.

Weather Message Beta 5

I am in the process of uploading Weather Message Beta 5. I am also refreshing all of the other applications. No big changes - check the release notes for the details.