Constructing MyMetar.com, by Tyson Weihs
A new version of both the Dashboard and Yahoo! Widget Engine widgets is available. This version adds a pressure trend indicator, MyMetar flight rule icons, and some minor bug fixes – including one that used the first station in a group as the group name in the drop-down.
Squash
The IE bug I wrote about earlier was squashed with tonight’s release. The cause: keeping a copy of a new user’s preferences on disk, then replacing those with the default set of preferences created each time the preference set is saved. This only affected new users that signed up after December 16th and only the first time they logged in.
Space: a note about Web Application Development
Developers have a big tradeoff to make when building web (or any, really) applications: time or space. One can choose more available space (RAM memory) or more available time (CPU cycles). You save time by storing more data in memory and gain space by using the CPU to do things like fetch data from a database. If, however, the developer designs the application such that the data footprint is small and the technique for accessing data used reduces CPU time, the result is more bang (more concurrent users and faster page load time) for the buck.
Getting more of both typically means upgrading hardware. MyMetar does a couple of things to get more of both without having to upgrade hardware. Firstly, we store very little information in memory – almost none. This means we can scale to many users without taxing server memory (and wallets). Secondly, we use very efficient storage and caching techniques that minimize the CPU cycles used to fetch and store data. Developers can do some really dangerous stuff with relational databases that turn a very simple task into a slow and lumbering one. Thirdly, we don’t need to store much data about our users (more privacy for you and easier to manage for us). Fourthly, we try to keep the code succinct, which yields great benefits.
SIGMETs
There are a few new images in the radar library that you can now load up on your mosaics bar: surface prognostic charts (current through 48 hour forecasts) and SIGMETs/AIRMETs (turbulence, convective outlook, and “maximum turbulence potential”).
Norway Weather
I looked into adding Norwegian doppler radar imagery to the Library for our Norwegian users. The Meteorologisk Institutt, however, uses a cryptic scheme for generating their radar image URLs – not as developer friendly as the NOAA weather images. Anyone know any propeller heads at Met.no that might want to share their scheme for the benefit of MyMetar users?
They’ve got good looking radar in Norway too. Example:
There is a minor yet annoying bug for newly registered users (new after the 15 December upgrade). Preferences revert to default unless the user first signs out then signs back in. Working on a fix now! This was discovered with Internet Explorer 7.0.
My PPL “flight test” (a.k.a. check ride) was this morning. Result? Passed!
Since it’s Christmas, it’s only appropriate to quote Clark W Griswald and say “Hallelujah, <censored>, where’s the Tylenol!”.
The weather section of the oral? No prob 
. He expected I be able to read a METAR, at least. Winds were a bit blustery this morning. Having put the plane down on the centerline on all the landings, though, left me some latitude to forget a few minor details. As the evaluator noted, “if you can put it down in these conditions without running it off the runway, I may overlook some minor omissions.” Should I add a crosswind calculator to MyMetar.com?
Happy holidays all!
As of today you will notice some new enhancements to the site! In a nutshell, improvements include:
One of the most important is better compatibility with Internet Explorer 6.0. After that, it’s the inclusion of support for Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 2.0.
I’m very excited about our RSS support. With RSS we can feed your weather to you through My Yahoo!, Google Home Page, Bloglines or the RSS news reader of your choice (I prefer Vienna, being a Mac user)! If you are new to RSS, Wikipedia has a page describing RSS and you can find a list of compatible RSS readers here.
So, what can you do with MyMetar.com’s RSS support?
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.Enjoy!
Web Browser Sidebar
Web development is quite frustrating at times, especially when it comes to working through the idiosyncrasies of different browsers. Firefox (which I recommend), Safari, Opera, Camino, Internet Explorer (IE) 6, and now Internet Explorer 7 do not always treat “standards” equally, and sometimes the standards are left to interpretation by the developers. IE always tends to make things just quirky enough to make wasting away an afternoon on some minor formatting issue an all-too-common event. Hopefully that changes with IE 7.0.
Browser idiosyncrasies means that the user interface might look just perfect in Firefox, then degrade horribly in Internet Explorer. Since MyMetar.com was originally started as a personal project for my own use, I developed it to support Firefox. When my flight instructor, Jesse Armstrong (btw, if you’re in Houston, book some flight time with him – he’s good), posted a link to MyMetar to a pilot forum, everything changed. Support for IE became a must: IE has the largest share of the browser market.
Going forward, IE is part of our “quality assurance” process (me clicking on a bunch of links until something breaks).
Curious what the weather is like in the Maldives? Mele, the capital of the Maldives and home of Maldives International Airport, probably has its fair share of VFR days. Current conditions in Mele, Maldives: VRMM
How about Bern, Zurich, Auckland, Cape Town, or Vladivostok? Then bookmark Pascal Dreer’s page – he watches them all.
Curious who wins the award for the most stations on one page? It’s MyMetarian “doublehoya”: his page is here (caution: may take a few seconds to load the 64 stations bookmarked on this one).
Cruising the halls of AOPA Expo this weekend, I (re)discovered a number of Internet weather resources and learned about some new initiatives. There are a bunch of resources out there, so as pilots we have no excuse not to know what the weather picture is. Still, it’s a pain to hunt it all down (yup, we’re trying to simplify that process).
Most pilots do something like this, I found: a hop to AOPA’s weather site; maybe a trip over to ADDS at NOAA for some Java tool swimming; a jaunt to WeatherUnderground.com; load up RTFP or Voyager on the desktop and and wade through the stream of data that is spit back at you.
Besides those, there’s also Pilot My-Cast for your phone, Anywhere Map, WeatherTAP from Trade-a-Plane, DUATS, and more. Still, lots of wading to be done (by the way, until December 2nd you can use the username AOPA2006 and password AOPA2006 for a free tour of WeatherTAP.com).
Lockheed Martin, I learned, has a new initiative that includes dropping kiosks at airports which will let you manage flight plans and (I think) provide some weather data – more weather!
There’s tons out there. The goal here with MyMetar.com is aggregating information that’s available from a variety of sources and making it available to you conveniently. If you see a source of weather we should add, shoot us a link and we’ll explore how to get it plugged in either to your page or to the library.
Shout out to Jamie C., a 747 FO with British Airways who wrote in, noting “I’m setting up my MyMetar page with all the destinations in the route network so I can keep an eye on things from home before I leave (and know what to pack!)”.
Thanks for the note Jamie, and keep the feedback coming.
A bug with TAFs was causing some errors when a station reported no TAF. As a workaround, we disabled the TAF popovers and TAF reporting. The bug is fixed and in production, so TAF popovers are working again.
Upgrade!
MyMetar.com got a bit of an upgrade this weekend. New in this release:
Thanks to all the MyMetarians who submitted new feature requests. We’re working those into upcoming releases. On the horizon:
Radar Collections
We’ve added the concept of “radar collections”, or groupings of related radar images (e.g. the NOAA Static Doppler collection is a set of tiles from NOAA’s ADDS website). The collections aggregate radar or other weather depiction images from around the web, letting you see all your favorite images from one page.
If you would like to see radar collections added, send in a link to the images you’d like to see added or send in an XML document with the collection details. A sample radar collection XML file is available online. Coming soon is a web form you can use to add your own URLs.
If you’re outside the U.S., your radar collection contributions are especially valuable!
MyMetar.com METARs on Your Blog or Web Page!
Also new this release is support for Widgetbox widgets. This means you can drop MyMetar.com weather on your blog or website. Try it out now and see how the widget will look with your METARs configured. The East Cooper Pilots Association is using the widget to give their members a quick visual indicator for local weather. Thanks to Jean-Samuel, the first (as far as we know) MyMetarian outside the U.S. to use the widget to on a website for Kejy Aviation.
If you happen to drop a widget on your blog or web page, let us know and we’ll drop a link to it in a widget gallery page.
MyMetar.com at AOPA Expo
Tyson will be at Expo 2006 this year. Any MyMetarian at Expo is entitled to a gratis frosty beverage.
