WeatherScan Local Emulator Project > News and Updates

Weatherscan has been on hiatus, but is coming back!

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cc17926:
It has been many years since the application has been updated, which is good because up until 2016, not much has changed for the source of weather information.

Since 2016, the NWS has re-located where the program has sourced current condition and forecast data. The NWS has also completed the Mixed-case lettering transition of its products. Also IBM has purchased The Weather Channel name and digital assets, in turn re-located the online maps, and modernized their appearance.

Internally, the development environment is ran on Windows XP since its inception in 2003, then moved to a virtual machine in 2009. In mid-2016, the hard drive which contained this virtual machine environment suffered a file system crash and lost a key snapshot file in the virtual disk chain. I have since been able to recover the environment in such a way that no work was lost in the process. I have also re-located this virtual machine to a location which does undergo a daily backup to a RAID array.

Also, the domain 'copper.yi.org' which was home to Weatherscan Local's management portal has changed as well.

Enough of the bad news.. Here's some good news.. The move of data to the new location of the NWS was very seamless. Updating the program to fetch the operational config from the proper domain was seamless as well. The change to Mixed-case lettering threw off one of the management portal's scripts, but was easily fixed.

Currently, in the development environment, the program is able to fetch and present Local Forecast information along with Radar and Satellite maps, respectively. All other products, which rely on a map from The Weather Channel need to be sourced again before being enabled in the management portal.

So, moving forward, the maps will need to be updated in the program. I would like to clean out old commented source-code, and source-code which is no longer utilized. I am hoping to get a new client installer available soon to get folks back up and running, and re-open the gates for new users.

I am also looking for mature feedback in regards to where YOU would like to see the Weatherscan Local project to go next (realistic expectations, please). Leave them in this thread. Even if you are a lurker on this forum, a simple  :thumbsup:  will suffice to signal your continued interest in further development.

Brian

bmilacek:
Great news  :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:
Excited to get it running again. Always liked the Halloween theme.

coolcole28:
For someone who was late in being able to use the emulator, glad to see I'll have an opportunity. Excited to see what's to come.

dfwstormwatch:
I am very interested!

cc17926:
Thank you to everyone for your continued interest.

Just a brief update.
-I have corrected all of the changes that the NWS has made by utilizing Mixed-case lettering
-I renamed the Outdoor activity to Fall Outdoor activity.
-Created a new package for Spring/Summer Outdoor Activity, simply called: Outdoor Activity
-All maps sourced from TWC has been remapped to TWC's IBM counterpart version.
-Traffic Overview has been re-sourced from Yahoo (defunct) to Mapbox, and is looks amazing (thanks to Kelby). Traffic Incidents is also being re-sourced, I am between two different providers at the moment.
-Several bug fixes between everything.

Todo:
-Traffic Incidents (curate a provider)
-Repair the Airport package (curating a data provider)

Test installation on a Windows 10 x64 computer was mostly successful, only was missing an overlay file.

Questions/comments/criticisms are welcome!

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