Well, the results are in. Earl weakened pretty significantly as he traveled up the east coast, resulting in fairly minor damage. The game had a lot of first-timers, and most of them did pretty well. I’m pleased with my own performance, but I’d rather win. There might be another chance shortly if the remnants of Gaston get back together.
Also, I finally made a page with a link to all of the scored games and added that link to the tropical weather page.
The hurricane season is in full swing, with three active storms. Danielle is scooting off to oblivion in the North Atlantic, but Earl is gearing up to take a run at the east coast…somewhere. As of this writing, the forecast track is such that landfall could be anywhere from the Outer Banks to Nova Scotia, or perhaps it may yet turn out to sea. Of course that means there’s a Funnel Fiasco tropical contest underway. You can enter by clicking the link on the tropical weather page (or go directly to it here). The deadline for entry is Tuesday at 8 PM EDT (Wednesday 0000 UTC). Just a reminder to make sure you enter valid numbers, I won’t check them for you.
Stay tuned for more on Hurricane Earl, and also for a potential repeat when Tropical Storm Fiona get closer.
On Monday evening, Angie and I went chasing unexpectedly. While the storm produced some wind damage, I’ve been unable to find confirmation of a tornado (there was at least one real-time report, though). We saw very little of interest, until the incredible light show afterward. So I present to you a few boring cloud pictures, plus also the lightning:
http://weather.funnelfiasco.com/chase/21jun10
This is also kind of exciting because for the first time I’ve forgone the use of tables to layout the photos. The result is that the page renders based on what your screen wants it to, not on what I demand it does. This is supposedly a much less evil way to do things. In the future, I’ll be converting some of the older pages to work this way as well.
Further, I’ve updated some of the pages to reflect new license information. Instead of my custom written “you must have my permission” text, I’m now licensing content under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. It’s simpler, more enforceable, and more in line with my own personal values. There’s a blog post forthcoming where I muse upon licensing issues. In the meantime, know that the content on FunnelFiasco.com is under whatever license it says it is. I’ll work on updating the license text on pages soon. And maybe I should consider a more dynamic site (e.g. using PHP) so that I don’t have to keep making these changes on each. freaking. individual. page.
You may recall on Saturday that I mentioned some big things that were coming. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait long. I’m proud to announce that an idea I’ve been thinking about has finally been realized this weekend. Without further ado, the Funnel Fiasco mobile weather site. The idea behind this site is simple: the National Weather Service makes a lot of data available but it isn’t always in a mobile-friendly format. Even the NWS mobile page has some bad navigation (and more importantly, doesn’t include velocity data, which is very important to chasers). All I’ve done is to re-package the data in a way that I want to see it when I’m away from the computer.
All of the data is mirrored and hosted locally to minimize my impact on the NWS servers (and thus save taxpayer money!). The local storm reports (LSRs) are grabbed by a cron job every 10 minutes. I use the comma-separated value (CSV) files hosted on the Storm Prediction Center’s storm report website. The CSVs are parsed by a Perl script I wrote and then a static HTML page is generated. For the radar data, the images are mirrored on demand and a Perl script generates the output on the fly. The radar data piece is a fairly heavy-duty script (by my standards, at least) and so I still consider it in beta. For now, it actually runs on my server at home and not on the main funnelfiasco.com server. I plan to move it onto funnelfiasco.com (and hope it doesn’t kill my bandwidth limits) after further testing.
I have to say, I’m pretty proud of the work I’ve done, almost all in the space of a weekend. It’s nice to be able to add some useful content to my site. I hope that it will get some good use and continue to grow. As I come across data that can be easily manipulated, I’ll add it to the site. Of course, if you wonderful readers have data you’d like to see, please let me know.
In the past two days, I’ve made a few minor site updates. They mostly revolve around removing dead links and otherwise making things tidy. I also removed the CSS element that made links go all caps when you hover over them. It was a neat effect, but it messed with page rendering sometimes.
The more major change is that I’ve removed links to my ham radio pages. Frankly, I’m just not that interested in the hobby of amateur radio anymore and I never had much content on there to begin with. I won’t remove the pages, since I’ve got plenty of disk space available, but I am running low on subdomains, so I’ll be retiring kc9fyx.funnelfiasco.com later this month.
Take heart, though. I’m also working on adding a lot of content (that I hope will even be useful!). I’m not quite ready to open the curtain yet, but I’m very excited. More to come soon!
Thanks to the Akismet plug-in for WordPress, I rarely have to worry about spam comments making it onto my blog posts. However, to make sure I don’t miss any legitimate content (Sundeep’s comments are often flagged as spam), I’ll occasionally go through and check the queue. Most of the spam comments are just a collection of links and key words. Every once in a while, though, a gem appears. So in lieu of having anything relevant to say, I thought I’d share some of the more amusing spam posts.
From my post about the Tropical Storm Ida forecast contest:
I have often read about this interesting format! I have long wanted to use it instead of raster graphics. In my opinion an excellent option for the site.
It often for the design of the site do not necessarily use the full-color pictures, which is not bad and weigh. But this option could create a completely different design elements, and weigh much less, Another undeniable plus is that for them, and CSS can create. As a result, you can modify the elements themselves, and not to change the picture.
So I would like to know more detail about it. How long is now feasible. Which browsers already supported as a simple files and animation. Just read that Maykrosoftovskom browser with the problem. A fox and Opera is normal work, and about Safari Googley browser does not hear.
From my post about upgrading to Fedora 12 via yum
I stand here today humbled by the task before dofus kamas, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our cheap dofus kamas. I thank President dofus power leveling for his service to buy dofus kamas, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.
From my post about Accessing Taleo from Mac or Linux
Dear Author blog.funnelfiasco.com !
Yes you are talented
From my post about my future with Apple products
Great headline. If your cookie has a bite-sized action and your reader completes the action, I think two things happen. Their self-confidence goes up (which feels good) and their trust in you increases.
From the About page
This is my first word 
Hi
From my post about how Twitter made me feel important
Why aren’t there bullet-proof pants?
Hi, everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve head a blog post. I’m not dead or anything, don’t worry, I just haven’t been that inspired to write much of anything. I think the trick is going to be to write less for some imagined audience and more about whatever it is that’s on my mind. I have to understand that not all of my readers will enjoy all of my posts, but as near as I can tell this is the only weather/sports/sysadmin/high-performance computing/high-throughput computing blog in the whole world. So I’m writing this first, and then I’ll get a few posts pre-written to give me a bit of a buffer. Oh boy, this should be exciting!
Oh wow, I’ve apparently gone 2 months without updating the Nugget Night page. I’m sure there has been much anxious waiting. No worries, I’m still eating, but not to the levels I used to. It’s hard being old.
Well, the results are in for the TS Ida forecast contest. I’m glad to say that yours truly finally won. Of course, there will be plenty of argument about the faults of the scoring equation. You’ll get over it. I don’t know who Dr. Free Beer is, but next time, try to get your forecast in the right hemisphere at least. Which brings up a good point… I think I’ll edit the game code to have a field for e-mail address (it will be hidden from the public, but available to me so that I can contact players/verify edited forecasts).
Fortunately for interests along the Gulf of Mexico, Ida has been mostly nuisance. This is not a bad way to end what has been another rather tepid hurricane season. Ida went extratropical very shortly after making landfall (much to the chagrin of my friend Kevin). I wonder if it set a record for quickest tropical to extratropical conversion. Not that Ida was all that tropical at landfall.
In other news, thanks to Perl’s Math::Trig module, I can now trivially calculate the Great Circle distances, which has long been the sticking point. At this point, all that remains to automate the scoring is some parsing and simple arithmetic. That’ll make it easier to get results out quickly. I haven’t yet decided if I should stop producing static results pages and let the CGI generate the results page on the fly, or if I should continue having separate, static pages for the results. I might go with the former in order to conserve disk space. I have no limit on cycles, so long as I don’t take down my provider’s server. We shall see. The first step is to actually write the code like I said I would two years ago.
This week’s excuse for not recording is that my wife has what seems to be a feverless flu. I do want to go on record as saying I think Purdue can beat Michigan, but I’m not sure they know it. This is about how I felt before the upset of tOSU: Purdue is capable of winning, but I’m not going to expect it. Enjoy your Saturday!
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