Adventures with Computers
Archive for August 2000
I’ve just updated PHP Weather again. There was a bug
in the code that parsed the air-pressure. I now know that the pressure can
be written both as A2991 and as Q1013. The first form is 29.91 inHg
and the second is 1013 hPa.
I thought that the pressure was always measured in hPa, so all the
altimeter_* numbers were wrong if the pressure was reported in inHg.
PHP Weather now deals correctly with both forms.
The version-number in you copy of PHP Weather
should now say 1.11. You can find this number in the top of phpweather.inc.
This time Stefan Wiesendanger has speeded up the parsing by replacing the large switch- and case-statements with a couple of arrays. This also makes it easy to translate PHP Weather into other languages. If you do so, then please mail me, so that I can organize the translations.
Last week gimpster.com had a kind of anniversary. I’ve now had my domain
six months! That meant that I’ve just paid almost 100 dollars to
NETsite :-) But that’s okay — they have been
quick and helpful when answering my questions. It only took them a few
days to transfer me to this new server.
The speed of which PHP Weather fetched the METARs
was quite poor. But then Enrico Lodolo
suggested that I used HTTP instead of FTP to connect to the server.
So, go get the new version. You could also try my page, which should load significantly faster now.
Today I started in school again, after a summer-holiday that lasted about
two months. It’s going to be a bit hard to get used to be in a classroom
for perhaps eight hours a day. But this year I wont have to have anymore
German, and instead I’ve got Computer Science. I really don’t know what to
expect of it. Perhaps we’ll learn a lot of exciting things (I hope that),
or perhaps we’ll just be bored. But then at least we’ll have four easy
lessons a week. So basically its a win-win situation :-)