PowderStash telemetry graphs

Now that there is some data worth looking at I'll remind everyone to<br>have a look at the telemetry graphs at www.powderstash.com .<br>They present ten days of the useful and unbiased mountain weather data<br>from the Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center in an clear,<br>graphical view.<br><br>Freshie.

Thanks for providing this service! I know from looking at your graphs last winter from other computers that they can be really useful in discerning conditions in the mountains, but unfortunately I can't view them from home because they don't display on my Macintosh. I get pretty much the same result with IE5.1 and Netscape 7, (which is: the telemetry station buttons display on a black background, but clicking them doesn't seem to produce any action), so maybe the problem lies with the Mac implementation of Java? I am able to view and use Java applets I come across on most other sites, though. I know that the Mac is a small fraction of browser traffic, but if there is anything you can do to change this, it would be great.<br><br>I'm curious about the format changes you mention, which required you to rework your program. Are these changes related to the reversing of the display order of the hourly data? It seems like all the sites got reversed except for Baker - strange.

Wow that's a great service!<br><br>Freshie can you tell us about the technology you're using? Does NWAC actually send the telemetry data to you or do you have a program which fetchs their telemetry webpage and parses the data?<br><br>If you do the latter how often does NWAC change the format of the http pages?

Thanks for getting that up and going again, Freshie.<br>I found it really useful last year. I was wondering if the new format of the raw data was going to give you any problems. You seemed to have taken them all in stride.<br>Good on ya.<br>

These were the first format changes the NWAC has made since I have been paying attention to the data. PowderStash uses a program that just fetches all the raw text files every hour and parses them for the data and then saves the data in files (with a common structure) that are uploaded to the PowderStash website. Each station requires a seperate method to parse the data since each station has a slightly different format. I had to rework the method for each station when the formats changed.<br><br>When the Java applet runs on the client machine it pulls the data file in for each station separately (they are only about 2K in size). I am working on a version of the telemetry page that uses static gifs instead of the applet, but each gif is going to be around 40K so people with slow connections will find the performance much less acceptable.<br><br>You can beta the static gif version at: www.powderstash.com/telemetry_gifs.html <br><br>Freshie.

I tried out the beta version and it works great! It wasn't too slow on my dial-up, and it is better than not being able to see any graphs at all from my Mac. Thanks for letting us have a look. I can't seem to find a link for Paradise - maybe that is part of the work left to do?

<br>Whoops, that's why it's a beta. Now there is a link for Paradise.<br><br>Freshie.