I started with VWS around late 2000 but had issues with it (extremely slow support, if any at all) and moved to WD for about 18 months before moving to FreeWx in 2003, Cumulus in 2010 and now my own custom written software.
Why the move from WD? Too many patches kept coming out (and, from what I can see, still do). Brian woudl fix one thing and break something else in the meantime. The interface I didn't care about because I designed and wrote my own web display pages (yes, stealing from other pages as they gave me other ideas
). But as time went on and more and more things got broken because Brian attempted to make WD cater for every weather station out there plus those that didn;t exist (not really, but think you will get my meaning if you look at the list of supported stations) I wanted something simple in both operation and display (again because I don't use the displays and there is curently NO software around that caters for this type of operation hint hint...)
The other reason, in 2003, I changed was I had upgraded to a Windows 2003 server and WD was having trouble running on it as a stable program.
FreeWx worked in this environment and did me until I upgraded again in 2010 to a Windows 2008 R2 server (the 2002 Server HDD had died one night so I did the only honourable thing - the disk platters are now coffee cup placemats on my desk and I bought a new MoBo, complete system and installed a fresh new OS) - being 64 bit this completely broke FreeWx and Andy Keir had stated, quite openly, no further development. For about 2 weeks I went back to first VWS then WD then Cumulus. VWS wouldn;t run for more than 10 minutes on a 64 buit OS - it laster less than 12 hours.WD was then tried with the latest incarnation and whilst it was better than VWS it still tended to crash every 60 minutes or so. Plus I wanted to import my data into WD's library (see the other thread about importing data into Cumulus). The problem was, although WD/Brian provided an import routine (as did VWS), WD's was hopelessly broken (FreeWx at one point I had logging every 10 mins,m then every 5 before I wised up and logged every minute - the problem was Brian's conversion routine wanted to generate data every minute regardless of what you originally logged and so 'calculated' the missing minute data. Well, calculated is the wrong word, it literally invented values that were all over the place and hopelessly wrong). I corresponded directly with Brian in the hope of getting this fixed but was told, in no uncertain terms, that WD required minute by minute data therefore it had to generate this missing data (!!!!!!!).
Long story short, Brian never fixed it properly which made the import routine as useless as ti.... well the bull is still out there and Brian has a very short wick on his temper!....
For about 12 months I used Cumulus - then the arguments started about V2 - yes, no, yes, no, give up. (Settle down steve and read on). Personally Cumulus should be doing the basics and nothing more. Simple is best. Let us, the users, do all the fancy bits and add the bells and whistles. For example, FreeWx didn;t generate web page - for that you used GhostWriter. This meant that FreeWx was able to go for extremely long periods between software updates - because it did exactly what it was meant to do and nothing more. Upgrades didn't break previous upgrades and didn't require a new one 2 or 3 days later - sound familiar with Cumulus?
Now I use my own software to read my station, generate the files I need and generate my own web pages from those files (which, incidentally, are both TXT and MySQL so I get the best of both worlds AND a back up at the same time - well two backups really as I store, every minute, to 3 independent MySQL databases on 3 totally seperate machines).
What should steve do? At the risk of upsetting him (again!) - Cumulus IS good - there is no doubt about that. But recently he has been caught in the fix this....whoops I broke that...fix that....whoops it broke the other thing etc. Finish this cycle and get everything stable again.
Then either a) let others do the add ons for graphs, displays, wierd/ridiculous data calculations or b) do these himself BUT in a seperate add on for those that don;t want bells, whistles and fog horns. Turn Cumulus into a Pro package - not free, not sharewarem not donationware (keep V1 if he wants to) but improve the current version so it become, like VWS, WD etc a saleable package. If someone wants to then build, and provide, an addon for say, WD importing, let them by way of an API that allows external developers to hook in to the main system BUT without affecting the main systems data collection and storage.
But back to WD - basically good package that is trying to do too much all the time. Too many/frequent updates and too hard to configure (didn't mention that but try and see how many menu options you have to go to to turn the Internet on or off in WD - from memory there are THREE totally different menus that do it, and each do it a different way that affect the others).
Stephen
Punctuation is the difference between 'Let's eat, grandma' and 'Let's eat grandma'
Hey Woody, what was you question ?
.Enuf said.
