Basejumper.com - archive

Hi All--

I've always assumed the winds at our local big wall were consistently very high over the winter. It seems like every time I looked at the nearest weather station, it was showing something over 100 km/h--not jumpable for most of us.

Last winter, my brother, Jason, wrote a small program for OS X which displayed the winds in his dock. That program gave him a pretty good feel for the winds, since he could see what they were in a glance. In February, the winds were completely calm for a couple of weeks, so we decided to go for it. After a five-hour slog through waist-deep snow, we got our first winter jump from that exit point in perfect conditions.

Inspired by Jason's work, I decided to write a "gadget" for Windows Vista/7. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now, and am very happy with the results, so I thought I'd share it with everyone. You can download the gadget here:

http://flysight.ca/...ware.htm#WindWatcher

There's a short manual which you can download by clicking on the second link on that page.

At the moment, the Wind Watcher gadget supports the Environment Canada and Weather Network webpages. The Weather Network seems to give plenty of data outside of Canada. I'm working on code to handle Weather Underground, but they do things a bit differently, so it could take me a little while.

Let me know if you have any questions/comments, or if there's another weather webpage you would like to see supported. The key thing for the graph at the bottom of the gadget is that the website must provide historical data (preferably in a "last 24 hours" format).

Enjoy!

Michael

i was wondering if you could share the code with me, as i'm a student at itt tech and have a programming class this quarter. i learned how to program back in the 80's in basic and a little cobol, but this new stuff is confusing me. i'm trying to get a feel for how to apply what i'm learning to something useful, but it's hard for me to wrap my mind around what i'm getting in class, mostly forms and stuff that adds shit up. thanx.

As it turns out, the gadget file itself is just a renamed zip file, so you have the source code already. Just unzip the downloaded file into its own folder, and you should see the HTML/CSS/JavaScript source for the gadget.

Michael

i must've done something wrong, when i downloaded it, it just came up as a gadget file and not zipped. it's working, i guess. can you change the location? i tried typing in crw for the location, but it stayed on calgary. anyways, it's still cool.

where can i find your brothers program for osx?

The gadget file itself isn't zipped. A gadget file is made by zipping the source code for the gadget, then renaming the zip file ".gadget" instead of ".zip". It's not really relevant, except if you want to look at the source code. In that case, instead of double-clicking to install the gadget, you can unzip it and take a look at the source.

You can change the location to any weather station covered by Environment Canada or The Weather Network. There are more details in the manual, but for Charleston, you want to switch the server to "Weather Network" and set the weather station to "uswv0138".

Michael

I can help with that. What version of OSX are you running?

snow leopard. thanks.

This should work, then! If you need help getting it set up for a particular weather page (particularly since I haven't tested this outside of Environment Canada in years), PM me and I'll do what I can!

thanx for the help. that's a pretty cool gadget.

Thanks for the gadget. Much cleaner and nicer looking than the multiple weather network ones I had up before.