I found a very cool applet called Weathergraph. The idea is to chart a graph of temperature, windchill/heat index, and wind on 4 graphs; daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Because of a graphing database tool call RRD, the database stays the same size even as the graphs ingest more data.
If it were only this easy.
The program required installing a Perl (Perl is an interpereted computer language heavily used in web applications) module call Geo::Metar and RRD Tool. So I won’t become a pain in the butt to my webhost, I decided to install these myself… local to my site. I bet if I knew Perl or even Bash scripting this would have been easier.
Perl modules don’t want to be installed locally, and when they are… they cry.
There’s a concept in Linux (which is what geofffox.com runs on) called ‘superuser’ or su. I don’t have that privilege on this server. That means there are lots of things I can’t do. Many of those would make all of this easier.
I got it done, but please don’t ask me to retrace my steps. I have no idea!
Immediately, I realized I didn’t care as much about windchill/heat index as I did in dew point. No problem. Just rewrite the program.
Again, I don’t know Perl. But, I’ve come to the conclusion that most computer languages are very similar, and with the help of a few books, I think I figured it out.
Unfortunately, every time a graph was plotted, the dew point and temperature were the same. No good.
Back to the program. If you’ve never seen what computer programs look like, here’s a small sample:
“http://weather.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/mgetmetar.pl?cccc=$site_code”;
$response = $ua->request($req);
if ($response->is_error) {
$failed[$i] = $response->as_string;
sleep(90);
}
}
if ($response->is_error) {
for ( $j = 1; $j <= 5 ; $j++){ print $failed[$j]; } die;
I’m still not 100% sure (because once this program gets running it takes a significant amount of time before it will actually plot a graph) but it seems like the problem was in the windchill/heat index routines. I had turned all mentions of windchill/heat index into dew point, but didn’t realize the program still wanted to apply the rules of windchill/heat index to the dew point. And tonight, there is no windchill or heat index.
I pulled that section of code from the program.
This may be way beyond me. Who knows? I am nothing more than a 53 year old ‘script kiddie.’
When the graphs go ‘live’, I’ll post an announcement. I expect to have one for each ‘official’ weather station in connecticut and maybe a few others. Each graph will cost me 233 Kbytes of my limited space.