Today around lunch time snow started falling all around the Denver Metro area. The snow wasn’t sticking to the ground in Denver, but our webcam captured the snow sticking in Castle Rock. Unfortunately the temperature warmed up enough to melt the snow by evening.

This evening CastleRockWeather.org HQ was pelted by pea sized hail and terenchal rain. After the hail let off, we snapped some pictures. Nothing like the Parker, CO hail storm a few weeks ago but loud and exciting none the less. Enjoy…

Castle Rock Weather is experiancing a webcam outage. Webcam images stopped at yesterday around 10:45 PM MDT. The issue appears to be DNS related and we are working with our ISP to resolve the issue. Thank you for your understanding while we work through this technical issue.

Update @ 9:48 AM MDT: ISP changed my IP address, which broke webcam PHP code. Code changed to use DNS URL instead of static IP. DNS records have been updated with new IP address. Looking into new ISP this morning, to avoid repeat.

Today @ 11:33 AM MDT the CRW Weather Server experienced catastrophic hardware failure. The problem was traced to a bad system board. The faulty system board was replaced and system operations restored. Data, collected by our instruments, during the outage was downloaded to the server. CRW.Org and data clients started receiving data @ 8:42 PM MDT.

Another change to the Google application caused our Weather channel map to be unavailable for some time. this morning the map was repaired. Problem boiled down to the “location” variable cannot have a space in it. “Castle Rock” was changed to “CastleRock”. Remember the devil is in the details.

We’ve replaced our rain sensor and everything appears to be working just fine. We will continue to monitor our rain collection numbers.

This weekend included a bunch of hardware drama. We are having network issues and sensor issues. It is true, “when it rains it pours!”

We are having problems with our cable modem. It has been dropping our connection nearly daily. Not a big deal if we’re home, but isn’t any fun when we’re at work. Yesterday was the last straw, and this evening we replaced our Linksys Cable Modem with a Motorola Surfboard. From what I’ve read this new modem is more reliable. We like reliable.

While diagnosing our cable modem issue we learned our Linksys firewall was swamped under our traffic loads. Two FTP devices, inbound webservices, uploading to our partners, and running our household internet took it’s toll. We have the little guy patched together the best we can. On order we have a business class Netgear Router/Firewall. Performance is nearly 15 times that of the Linksys. It arrives tomorrow, and should be deployed tomorrow evening.

We missed recording all of the rain that fell this weekend. We had a few good storms roll through, and our consoles, website, and software all read 0.00 in. We did some manual tests with little successs. We contacted Davis support, instead of going to work this morning. They believe our reed switch is faulty. They are shipping us new reed switches. Repairs should be completed early next week.

We appologize for these interuptions to your weather information site. Sometimes things are beyond our control. We are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.

esterday we learned more about Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) then we ever truely wanted too. CSS controls the layout and look of our text and images. It powers our navigation menu. It controls our images. It also manages font/fontsize/and color. Sounds important right?

In addition we were managing 2 style sheets. One for the main site, and a second for this BLOG. Small changes made in one were lost from the other. We made changes to the Wordpress files to point to a single shared style sheet. We moved all BLOG spedcifiec tags into the main style sheet. This should help preserve the same look and feel in both environments.

While our site maintains the same basic look and feel we have been battling formating problems for some time. Things that looked great in IE, would breakdown in Firefox/Safari web browsers. We track our visitors and while Internet Explorer is the majority, we have enough visitors using other browsers that this had to be addressed.

Writting a website isn’t like typing up a newletter or magazine. Webpages are viewed by as many as half a dozen different web browsers. Web browsers download the html code I write, and process them in their own unique way. The result is what your looking at. If my code is solid, then everyone sees the same thing. Sometimes my codes works well with one browser, but displays oddly on another. This is something that I’m learning as I continue this project.

Yesterday we resolved the major CSS issues with out site. We continue to strive to provide all our visitors with a simular high quality experiance.  Please feel free to email us your comments anytime.

We spent last weekend and early this week to installing the camera. We still have to tiddy up the CAT5 cable on the outside of the house, but its running. The second half of the week was spent working on delivery and image overlay (adding words over image). Those were 2 very tough problems.

FTP upload is a sore topic around the CRW offices. Our webhost limits the number of connections from our external IP address to 2. They have a package to expand this to unlimited, but it adds an extra $36 per month, and we need to become Linux server admins.

We are using the camera’s built in webserver, and allowing our webserver to connect via http directly and “pull” the image instead of pushing via FTP. The process avoids the FTP upload limits. So the image now is on the webserver, can we see it. We ran 24 hours without image overlays, but our goal is to include weather data directly on the webimage.

We tested ImageSalsa last week. Its a clunky, very complicated piece of software. The software does require a license purchased from Ambient Weather. The way things are going with VWS, we feel uncomfertable investing in that company any longer. ImageSalsa was uninstalled from our servers. Now what?

We have started working more and more with PHP, and figured there had to be something available which could replace ImageSalsa. Image overlaying is a process where you lay text directly over a base image, and create a new resultant image that includes your text. You can also use this to mask the source image, which we are.

Mike, from Long Beach, WA Weather, provided us with an awsome script to do all of that and more. We are currently using his script to transfer base image, resize, overlay text, and a partrige in a pear tree. One script that does it all. We then process our webcam image a second time through a simular script that creates the thumbnail image in the left navigation bar. Pretty slick.

I will update the “our equipment” page to include these two technologies that make our webcam come to life. We have plans to expand the information included on the text overlay. We are also working on scripts that will refresh the webcam image automagically, without refreshing the whole page. Down the road we will be looking for a way to stream video from our camera and provide time laps videos as well.

For now we’re up and running. Off to the next weather related project.