PolarLava::Blog

This entry serves two purposes.  1) To split an older weather related entry away from a more general site update message.  And 2) To document progress and or changes to my weather project as this thread seems to have grown over time.

-klp (3/17/2004)

10/17/2003
Previously I had been using Geo::Weather which pulls weather from the weather.com site.  I've been a frequent contributor to this project as I also used it to pull weather on an hourly basis for my CycleLog project.  It's a fairly constant battle with weather.com making changes and then having to fix the Geo::Weather code to properly parse their page.  Recently they added comments in their code that encourages you to use their free XML feed and not scrape their HTML.  This is good and I welcomed the idea of an XML feed until you read the the fine print.  Basically you have to provide a link back to them which isn't the end of the world, but they also reserve the right to shove advertising down to you that you must accept.  I don't accept and as such have decided it's time to move to free publicly available weather from NOAA.  Hell I'm paying for it (via my taxes), I might as well use it right?  So as such, I've written a Perl module I call "Geo::WeatherNOAA2".  Why the "2"?  There's already a Geo::WeatherNOAA, but it only grabs current text weather data from NOAA and that wasn't what I wanted.  My goal was to duplicate the functionality of Geo::Weather, but utilizing NOAA's freely and publicly available interface.  And although I know there's still some problems with it for certain locations and sometimes the forecast displays some quirky behavior, it's working for me.  When I have time I will work on some of these bugs and make it publicly available to all.  If you'd like to play with it now you can e-mail me at kevinp AT polarlava.com and you can join the fun!

  …more

I've finally managed to get this blog page XHTML compliant!  After much trial and tribulation, I've managed to track down all of the issues and get it to validate properly.  That said, it may fail the validation on various pages because some of the older entries may not be 100% compliant.  It's unlikely that I'm going to go back and track down all of the errors as they aren't critical, but then again being as anal as I am, I just might!  In the process of working on the XHTML compliance, I was able to implement one of the changes I had been wanting to do.  That being, the updated display look so entries now standoff in a sort of "box in a box" fashion.  I believe it gives it a cleaner look and differentiates each entries.  You might not see it that way, but then again it isn't your blog, now is it?  ;)  And now it's time to move to the next level.  …more

It's been a long time coming, but the new CycleLog Search page is finally done! And looking into it a bit, I find that it was just over a year ago that I mentioned the shortcomings of the previous search utility.  The new search now allows you to perform all sorts of date based searches.  You can now locate a specific ride, date bounded rides, X number of rides forward or backward from a specific date, as well as all rides on or in a particular month, day, year or any combination of those parameters.

More important than this just being a new search page, this represents a new beginning, effectively the start of CycleLog V2.0.  There is an entire new code base that drives the search utility and ultimately, the entire project.  Everything from here forward will utilize object-oriented PHP, a template engine and will be XHTML standard compliant.  This has been a long time in the making, but well worth the effort.  The next step will be to update the simpler section of the site: Summary, Latest and Random Ride pages.  Then a new edit/add section will be built to replace the existing add only section.  This will make life much easier as currently I have to manually edit the database to correct any data entry errors.

Oh, happy day!

A shortsighted programming decision fixed…When totaling highest and lowest average speeds, previously these were coded to use outdoor and indoor values respectively.  This has now been changed to use the higher or lower of the outdoor and indoor values, thus things now display as they should.

While working on the MyClient project, I stumbled upon an oddity in my ride data.  All of the indoor rides were flagged as being roller rides.  Certainly not the case as nearly all of my rides this season have been on the new fluid trainer.  It would seem that I had different variable names on the data collection and insertion code.  Patched that up and then began the tedious process of trying to fix the the database records.  Data for this year has been fixed, but I still need to review the past couple of years.  I guess my procrastination on getting the old data entered has actually saved me some work!