Cumulus Support

Just wondered if anyone here using Linux can view any Cumulus Realtime pages? I have tried for this and other sites which use it to get Silverlight running with Linux and found it to be so flakey its not true, just wont work. Rather frustrating as I was thinking about trying Cumulus again but this would be a show stopper for me if I was not confident of Realtime pages being viewable in Linux and so far my experience and that of a few others is the same with Silverlight. I know Flash is not generally liked but at least it does work reliably in Linux these days.

Stuart

broadstairs wrote:I know Flash is not generally liked but at least it does work reliably in Linux these days.

Stuart

Stuart, you could try using the Weather Console display which is jscript and reads information from the realtime.txt file. I added the wind guages to the bottom of it to give me that bit extra. You can also fiddle with the wconsole.js and add more tags to it to display more information. Realtime.txt has more information than when the Weather Console was first written.

Bob

Yes I could for my pages. My other probelm is that I really like WDL so perhaps the only way for me to go is to see if I can created the data needed for at least the basics of WDL from Cumulus.

However more and more Cumulus users seem to be using Cumulus Realtime and by doing so will give Linux users problems with Silverlight driven pages.

Just a personal thing but I feel using something which is not committed to be completely usable and fully supported on all platforms is not a good move and Silverlight definitely falls into that category as Microsoft are not committed as they have given that objective to Novell and V3 of the Linux code is really an alpha level product.

Stuart

Moonlight may not support all of the features that the Silverlight application uses. But the Silverlight application isn't Cumulus, it's just an optional add-on that I wrote because I found it interesting.

I find it rather odd that someone would choose not to use Cumulus just because Silverlight doesn't work properly on Linux. What you're basically saying is that by providing an optional extra, I have made Cumulus less attractive?

steve wrote:Moonlight may not support all of the features that the Silverlight application uses. But the Silverlight application isn't Cumulus, it's just an optional add-on that I wrote because I found it interesting.

I find it rather odd that someone would choose not to use Cumulus just because Silverlight doesn't work properly on Linux. What you're basically saying is that by providing an optional extra, I have made Cumulus less attractive?

I see your point but that is not really what I meant. Dont get me wrong I like the basic program its small, fast and easy to install and pretty reliable (when I last tested it). However I can only see the benefit from moving from what I have today if by one means or other I can provide all the functionality I currently have but with Cumulus and in a format which I can guarantee will be accessible by anyone who visits my site.

Today I use WDL and I need an equivalent function and Cumulus Realtime does not cut it today, I'd love to be able to see it and make some real comparisons but every time I try it crashes my browser because of the Silverlight functionality in Linux is useless.

For me anything I place on my website has to work in every platform I can think of. I know that if I visit a site which does not for whatever reason I will not go back and I dont want folk to fail to visit because they cant see my site. If they dont like it or dont find it useful fine that is personal choice, however I dont want to give them any cause because something will not work on their computer. Sadly Silverlight comes into this category. Its the same reason I validate all my pages against W3C as that gives me the highest confidence that it will work, if something I try will not validate I wont use it.

So please keep up the good work with Cumulus and I hope that in future I may be able to do what I want with it but today for me that is not the case. Personal preference again, I really do hope things change in future - perhaps even Microsoft will provide truly cross-platform products or maybe if I can find the time I'll try to create Cumulus equivalents to the clientraw files for WDL (and for that matter MML) if nobody beats me to it.

Stuart

broadstairs wrote:or maybe if I can find the time I'll try to create Cumulus equivalents to the clientraw files for WDL (and for that matter MML) if nobody beats me to it.

Or you could write a Flash equivalent of Cumulus Realtime / Cumulus equivalent of WDL. Seems a lot of trouble to go to, though, just to cater for 1.5% of web users

Out of interest, apart from the 'historical' stuff for graphing, what data does WDL use which isn't easily available from Cumulus currently?

steve wrote:Out of interest, apart from the 'historical' stuff for graphing, what data does WDL use which isn't easily available from Cumulus currently?

Right now I dont know as I've not taken the time to look. The problem is that it will only read the clientraw file format which means converting from the Cumulus files to this format. The MML server reads the clientraw.txt file to support the display of weather stations on the maps.

The other thing is that I have nearly 5 years of WD data which would need to be converted to Cumulus format if I were to only use one program which would be the intention if I move. I currently run a W2K PC for weather stuff and I'd want to continue using that for the time being and not have to update to XP or 7 on there.

W2K at present is also needed for WXSim which today does not support Cumulus for data input either, but that's a discussion to have with Tom Ehrensperger the author, he currently supports WD VWS and WeatherLink I believe.

So there are a number of things to get resolved prior to any move.

By the way although there are only about 1.5% of Linux users visiting my site in August last year (a busy period) there were nearly 10,000 hits in the month from identifiable Linux users and another 10,000 of unidentifiable OS users (at least some of which could well be Linux) which is quite a lot to upset if parts of the site dont work.

Stuart

PS. It would seem that the subscribe function in the forum does not always work as I did not get notified about either of your posts.