| Frequently Asked Questions |
Interested in advertising? Contact Josh @ aiweather.com
|
Welcome to the source
for actual weather on Anderson Island, WA |
|
||
|
|
||||
Interested in advertising? Contact Josh @ aiweather.com
| |||||||||||||||
Frequently Asked
|
Here's some FAQ's compiled from what I suspect people might ask and what people have asked.... If you have any questions, please contact me.
We use cookies not for tracking or anything like that -- we use them to remember the last page you were on. For instance, if you're on the "Storms" page, and select "StormVue" we remember that; so the next time you visit, and click on the "Storms" page, you are returned to "StormVue". We're not doing anything bad with the cookies. UTC was formerly known as "GMT (Greenich Mean Time) -- UTC is the abbrivation for "Coordinated Universal Time" (Yes, I know it's backwards). UTC uses a 24-hour system of time notation. "1:00 a.m." in UTC is expressed as 0100, pronounced "zero one hundred." Fifteen minutes after 0100 is expressed as 0115; thirty-eight minutes after 0100 is 0138 (usually pronounced "zero one thirty-eight"). The time one minute after 0159 is 0200. The time one minute after 1259 is 1300 (pronounced "thirteen hundred"). This continues until 2359. One minute later is 0000 ("zero hundred"), and the start of a new UTC day.
What are the icons above the left side menu buttons? These are "weather alert" icons -- click them to go the appropriate page; see What's New for more info.
What are your "ID's" for other weather sites? Please see the DataInfo page. What do you use to create the site? See the TechInfo page. Why are the values not updating? My best guess is either your browser doesn't support Javascript (or it's not enabled). Less likely reasons include outagse (power or DSL However, you'd see "technical difficulty" in the header), or I've got bigger problems. Hit F5 or refresh your browser - if it still is not updating -- let me know. Why does some text flash? Why are images older than text? We recently updated to a technology called Ajax. This allows us to update some of the values in the page in near "real time". So a lot of values/text gets updated regularly without reloading the entire page; however, we are not updating images in 'real time' to save your bandwidth. You can see all the values that are dynamically updated here. Press Refresh to update the graphics. The flashing is the values being updated. Why does AIWeather want to run an ActiveX? This is a 'security' feature of IE -- the activex it's complaining about is the "Listen to current conditions" component. There is no spyware in AIWeather.com What are those 'ghost lights' in the image sometimes? Despite being taped off, and despite being configured to NOT use them, the camera turns on the infrared (night-light) LED's -- I'll work on darkening them more. That is my garage -- the birdhouse got used for the 1st time in 2006. There is another birdhouse just below it that has been used for several years. I hope to have a webcam inside the birdhouse for this spring. The header image is a portion of the "live image" taken at noon (if before noon, it's noon of the previous day.) The reason it's blurry or difficult to see is if rain, the water droplets distorts the image. Why doesn't the recording update along with the data? Very good question, one I don't know the answer to -- other than I can tell you this: It's updated every 15 minutes at the server -- Despite us telling your browser not to cache anything; it appears some browsers DO cache the recording (mp3 file). I don't know a way around it other than refreshing (F5) the page. Why is the image on the main page black/missing? Because it's a cheap camera and doesn't do well after sunset -- sometimes a full moon will bring it back to life. The web page should replace it with a "noon time" image about an hour after sunset and re-display the live image about an hour before sunrise. You can see the actual image here, at all times. Time stamps of image / files / data isn't "in sync" I have received a few emails on why the timestamps aren't all the same. The answer is simple; but is sort of complex. I'll try to explain it simply here. Timestamps are generated "on the fly" when "things" are generated. Now, there's 4 different "types of things". A lot of things affect timing too.
So, a graphic can be generated at a different time than a webpage, but those are uploaded at close the same time; so it ends up with slightly different times. The ticker (blue band at the top) and mini (towards the top) views are the most up to date; with all the others slightly behind. If an Image says it was generated at 2:33pm and that page says 2:20pm -- the image contains data that is more current than the textual data. If data is more than an hour old, "we have a problem". There are 3 systems involved
Why is the data not more recent? (aka: Technical Difficulties) Well; this is FAQ not a dynamic page (ie: I don't update it constantly) but the most likely reason is that there's a power or phone/DSL outage on Anderson Island. When I'm home, I'll fire up the generators -- all the computers are on fairly good sized UPS's and should run for about 40 minutes w/o power. (We loose power fairly frequently.) Other reasons could be the system(s) are down for maintenance, I'm actively updating the website, or there is an "upstream" problem (ie: ISP routers are down). Typically, the "live" data should at most be 10-15 minutes old; but a delay of 30 should not be unexpected due to issues beyond our control. Typically this is momentary at best -- data is archived; so once it's uploaded, the graphs will be accurate, albeit delayed. The "warning" on the header banner is there only when the data is over an hour old.
Why do I get "500 server error" when the page refreshes? We are working on resolving this -- the answer is that a file (which is fairly large) hasn't been 100% uploaded to the server. Since the file is being transferred & not yet completely uploaded, if you access a page that uses the file, the server tosses an error. I have added a great deal of code to get around this; but it is still possible to receive the 500 error -- if you do; the page should be refresh in a few seconds and be "fixed" if you continue to get it -- please let me know! Why is there a gap in data? why are the Highs/Lows wrong? This is a very sad result of corrupted data on our server. The software we use ("Virtual Weather Station") started crashing. In working with the vendor, he said to clear out the data on the weather station. So in the 5 days we were down, the data is simply "gone" and cannot be recovered -- I'm working on resetting the highs/lows/totals on the weather station to recover a years worth of recording.... You can read more, here. |
|
Portions (c) 2007-2012 Josh Assing, AIWeather.com |
