waynealumni.org

Link: http://weather.waynealumni.org

Again, assuming someone out there looks at the weather site besides me, the site is back up and it has a new look.

The Gory Details

As luck would have it, a few days after I replaced a failed hard drive, the computer which interfaces my weather station to the internet died. Completely. Long story short, some electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard failed, and it wouldn't even power on. I looked at getting a replacement motherboard, and even repairing the board myself, but since it was an early Pentium 4 style, I initially decided to get a new motherboard with an Intel Atom processor and some RAM. Upon further reflection, I decided to get a new case, hard drive, and DVD drive along with it. Since my old hard drive was IDE and I got a new one that was SATA, I decided to keep the IDE drive for another system (along with the Windows XP license). Thanks for the people at J&N Computers who gave me a good deal and got it together quickly.

So I loaded Ubuntu Linux 8.10 on the new computer. That all went fine, I was up and running in 30 minutes. But all the software I got with my weather station was Windows based, and I wasn't particularly impressed with it. So I ended up loading Wview. Now WView is free and has some nice features, but it has no graphical interface. All command line Unix type stuff. There also were many prerequisites for various software that needed to be installed. Ubuntu has a nice interface for obtaining software and various library files, but still a few I needed to load manually, and the same with WView itself. I had a few problems, but was able to get it up and running in a day or two.

I still need to see if I can get some of the old data imported into the new file formats, but maybe later this week. I also am just using the default website templates, and I'll probably make some modifications there too.

I had hoped the old computer (I got in 2002) would last longer, but apparently many computers were built with faulty electrolytic capacitors earlier in the decade, so at least it lasted almost 7 years. I have other plans for that computer. I will attempt to get another motherboard real cheap and try to get a few more years out of it.