Cumulus Support

Where did beteljuice go?

My last communication with beteljuice was 9 November and afaik his last presence on this forum was at the end of November. Nobody has heard from him since. In his last mail we talked about my post on AirQuality and he confided that he was diagnosed with COPD and was in bad shape. He made clear that in case of lung failure it would be the end.

This has been 4 months now and I assume his end has come and we will hear no more from him. Unfortunately nobody knows who he really was and we cannot get in touch for confirmation but all his channels are silent.

So, unless any of you know otherwise, I think we have to assume that beteljuice has passed away, and I would propose a toast to beteljuice and all his valuable contributions he made over the years. Is there anybody who does not use a piece of code by him?

I personally am highly indebted to him for his contribution to the user interface of my fire weather index which bears his name.

Other work of him you will find dispersed over this forum. His personal digital legacy can be found on his own site on which the following specific links are given below (for as long as they remain online).

Personal sites:
"The Heap" - group of friends
Dark Star
The Philosophers' Song

Cumulus work:
Cumulus Realtime.txt AJAX (basic)
Zambretti forecast
NOAA #1 (to be found here on the forum)

New MX website mods
Unofficial User Map
Extremes (to be found here on the forum)
His famous dayfile reader you will find here on this forum.

Cumulus AirQuality:
Davis AQI Example #1
Davis AQI Example #2
Davis AQI Example #3
PurpleAir AQL Example

Other:
Big Baro #1 (to be seen at PaulMy's Komoka site somewhere)

Sun #1 (his own sun disc in php procedure, note that his site is already degrading, scroll down)
Sun #2 (here he tried to prove some things for the procedure I use in CUtils which is different from sun #1)

Thanks Hans for mentioning. I too have been waiting for a reply. He has been a great help to me for over a dozen years, and after his station failed many years ago he needed a data source so I was more than pleased to provide, and to experiment. Your links are but some of the things he tinkered with, and many got incorporated in the various Cumulus based templates and gadgets. One of my favourites is what I call the betelometer http://www.komokaweather.com/weather/glossary.html and the betel-watch is but a memory...

Paul

I'm so sad about this, the community has lost a valuable asset. As both say the beteljuice contributed many things to this community, as well as his own scripts he made contributions to many other peoples work.

If anybody has any information about him, then please shout out, though he seemed to prefer anonymity.
I'll be sparing a thought for him, his family and friends.

This is very sad news and the only logical deduction is that he is no longer with us. He must have been around from the earliest days and when you consider he didn't have a weather station his dedication to improving things for the rest of us was without equal. A very clever chap.

I am another grateful user of his Another Dayfile Reader and for his help in ironing out a few problems. His presence here will be sorely missed. I shall raise a glass to his memory later. Thank you beteljuice for all you did for so many of us.

Sad indeed if his watch is over.

Saludos a todos

Hearing this news, I feel very sad.
I have always admired Beteljuice for his intelligence, irony and his sense of humor.
We have all had fun juggling with him and many have appreciated the many scripts of his that appear on our pages.
He has left a very good memory among all of us.

Rest in peace

My Tribute to beteljuice.

I have been putting off adding to this thread ever hopeful beteljuice would reappear. But as time marches on the probability of this is slowly diminishing.
Like many of you I first met betel through this forum in 2010, asking for advice regarding the Cumulus Software. betel steered me in the right direction and continued to do so for the next 12 years

At the beginning of 2012 a group of New Zealand Weather Enthusiasts started a new Forum using the SMF Software. We were having issues with the software and I made an approach to betel for help. At that stage we were all manually submitting our yesterday data and from those Daily Data Summaries we manually compiled and uploaded reports.

betel noticed this and suggested he could code some PHP scripts to do the work for us. Hence began a few months work perfecting this, with many scripts and much time spent around our time zone difference playing

At one stage betel’s scripts were pulling data from 106 stations and laying out the summary but with weather station technology now plugging straight into routers/modems, our scripts are slowly losing the realtime and clientraw txt files that they need. Summary Link below for anyone interested.
http://www.localweather.net.nz/smf/nzlw ... l-data/86/

Look back to around January 2015 to get a better idea. To me this has always been one of beteljuice’s master pieces:)

One of the next projects betel and I embarked on was the “Current Conditions” Scripts. I wanted to be able to display the current weather as with sunny, raining, windy etc. I was just using the webtags to do this but betel had other ideas of which months later, I am sure he regretted ever going down this path The script started with a few pages and continued to grow trying to cover all conditions and all weather software products. This was months in the making with our time difference not helping. betel suffered from insomnia and would stay up until the sun rose to be in my morning and early pm, writing, sending, rewriting, resending.
If you are unaware of this script, it is here:
viewtopic.php?t=12831&hilit=current+conditions

As with many of our Cumulus Forum Members, my website is running many of betel’s scripts as with the Dayfile Reader, Graphic Sun Chart, Local airport script, the list is many. My knowledge of PHP is pretty much zero but betel taught me heaps making me try coding it myself first before he then rewrote the whole thing

The thought of the next PHP upgrade does not entertain me at all as every time there is an upgrade, many of our weather scripts just bail out. The last upgrade in September last year totally messed up my cloudbase and thermometer plus I had a few blank pages. betel helped fixed these for me and others.
The Weather Forum Data Summary also went belly up and betel spent much time rewriting scripts to fix this. I now see that he would have been struggling with his health at this stage and this pains me greatly.

Through time spent emailing and messaging, betel never hesitated to help me always returning my cry for help immediately. He also had a lot of patience and he sure needed that with me at times when I was totally lost as to what he was explaining. For this I will always be grateful. betel also had lots of 'muck around' php pages, and as with Paul, he would call on me to test/play with them or to be uploaded to my server to see if they worked. This was the fun betel.
Alas I was growled heaps betel did not like a capital B before his name. If I did not spell it betel with a lower case b, I was corrected. betel also disliked pleasantries, I did not dare type Dear beteljuice and Regards Jenny … oh no slap on the wrist for that .. So messages went more like this:

beteljuice: Jenny fix such in such, that’s not what I said.
Jenny: Ok

The only time I saw the softer side of betel was when his wife passed away. This knocked him badly and I found it hard to express my sympathy through messaging. betel sent me photos of the Hearse leaving the Church. The back was completely, and I mean completely, covered with flowers and looked amazing. I had not seen this before. I sincerely hope if we really have lost our beteljuice that family members or friends did the same for him.

His name is through many scripts on my site and it jumps out at me constantly when I am tweaking that which I probably shouldn’t be. There is no way I will and could forget our beteljuice and his valuable time given to me over the years. He was an extremely clever man and as a mentor he taught me heaps. I dread anything going wrong or another PHP upgrade as I am now on my own

Hope to see you again in the future betel, you will remain forever in my head especially when I mess up

Jenny

P.S. Did you notice betel, I used lower case b all the way through

Well done Jenny it is how many of us feel

Thank you Jenny, a well-deserved tribute.
I changed the B in the topic title to b. Each contributor has to do that him/herself for their own message.

Each contributor has to do that him/herself for their own message.

I did it for them. Only fair!!

One year now since we last heard from the beteljuice. Many scripts and ideas carry his trademark and will continue to do so. His personal assistance will always be remembered.

I owe him a load of gratitude.
Paul