Database problems

January 13th, 2010

The server still have some major problems, even after I closed down the widget. For people still having the old widget up, please uninstall the old widget since it will never work again. The new one will need a new install anyways.

When the blog is down it also affect the regex tool. So if you have problems with the regex tool and see that this blog is down you know the reason.

I have created a support ticket at my host and hopefully they will find an solution soon.

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

yrWeather widget replace by tWeather

January 4th, 2010

As announced earlier I had to rewrite the yrWeather widget to not use my server as a converter from xml to json. The 500k+ requests per day is causing big problems for my server and my other projects. I will “pull the plug” for the yrWeather widget in a couple of minutes. The old one will stop working… if it for some reason still work it is because some data have been cached.

I’m truly sorry for this but I had no other options, I already spend way to much money on the server I’m renting. I could not afford an upgrade for a weather widget I earn no money on.

It is going to be replaced by tWeather. It might look the same but it is a rewrite of the new app that uses YQL for the JSON conversion. It is also a bit more future proof, so it should be easier for me create a mac, opera, etc version later. This first release is just a alpha release without any options. It will just find the weather for your IP. It does not have a flyout either. I plan to expand this to include the same functions as the old yrWeather widget but it might take some time before I have completed that project. Lately I have been prioritizing my dog Yoshi over program in my spare time spacer

I have created this new gadget as google code project with the new BSD license. For download of the gadget or the source code go to code.google.com/p/tweather/

Stay tuned on this blog for new updates and changed in the gadget.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Server issues and the weather widget

December 8th, 2009

I have had a lot of problems with the server this fall. I was not sure what caused this, but now the xml2json.larsolavtorvik.com is the prime suspect. That is the page used by the weather widget. Since I already spend to much money on this server (without much profits) I will have to rewrite the weather widget to use a different data source. Hopefully as soon as possible. When the new version is out I will close down the xml2json page. This mean that all weather widgets that do not get upgraded to the new version will no longer work! Sorry for this but I really need to lower the trafic since it causing problems for all other sites on the server.

Stay tuned for updates, hopefully soon!

Tags: weather
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Book review

October 20th, 2009

I have just ordered the Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development. I plan to write a short review of this book as soon as I have read it, so if you are interested in learning more about the Symfony PHP framework stay tuned.

Tags: symfony
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Database problems

August 26th, 2009

My server have had some database problems latly that affected all my sites. This should be resolved now.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

weather 1.4.0

July 12th, 2009

First I would like to say thank you to everyone posting bugs and problems here on the blog. I do not have time or resources to test this on all combination of OS, coordinates, languages, time zones so your help is important to make this gadget as good as possible.

A new release (1.4.0) is now available for download at weather.larsolavtorvik.com. I planned to do a small bug fix release but when I started coding I found some major issues related to time zones so there are a lot of code changes in this release. Hopefully I have not introduced any new bugs… so please keep me notified here as always if you find any bugs spacer

  • Changed the 9 day forecast to a 8 day forecast. There was a problem with the 9th day on some locations and at some times. I solved this by changing it to 8 day instead of 9 day. This might cause some problems with existing gadget you have in the sidebar if you used 9 day. To solve this you can either close the widget and open again, or just go into setting and click ok to save the 8 day flyout.
  • Fixed a major problem regarding timezones and UTC. Now all times should be your locale time including summer time. Seems all times I have been showing have been UTC and not CEST as I expected. Sorry about that but I didn’t know the time I got from yr was UTC. Since yr.no do not give hour by hour forecast on the long term forecast the 8 day flyout need to show the forecast for 6,12,18,24 in UTC time. So if you are in CEST now in the summer you will get the times 2,8,14,20 and those times should also be displayed. Feel free to give me feedback if that works as expected for the ones of you not in CEST.
  • Hopefully fixed the problem with , and . the Swedish users have been having. I haven’t been able to actually test this, so please tell me if it works or not.
  • Added a moon up and down time in settings, default 22:00 to 05:00. In this time period the gadget will show the moon icon instead of sun on all pages.
  • The default view of the gadget updates every 30 min to not hammer my server and to not use more resources on your computer then necessary (the first version updated every couple of seconds and caused some problems). If your internet do not connect right away when you turn on your computer that meant it would go 30 minutes until the gadget got the weather or until you opened and closed settings (also open and close the flyout will work on Windows 7 but not Vista). I have changed it so if error it will now update every 2min instead.
  • If you opened the gadget for example 12:01. That would mean the main view would update the weather for the next hour at 13:29 since it checked for updated every 30min. Now it should update between 13:00 and 13:02.
  • The IP location check I used to find your coordinated and city automatically didn’t work any more so I changed to a different service.
  • I have started added some major cities like Stockholm, London, New York etc. All these none Norwegian countries have their country name after the city name and I use the English names like Copenhagen. Not sure if this is something people are interested in but I like to pay attention to the weather for locations I’m about to travel to before the vacation starts spacer I except to be adding more locations later, but it slow and boring work to add locations manually so we will see how much time I want to spend on it!

As I said in the comment for the 1.3.1 release, there are very many Swedish user of this application. If people want this application in Swedish (or other langauges) it is just for you to volunteer to translate it for me and I will include the translation in the next release (as soon as I get 2nd person to validate your translation :-)).

If there are some cities you would like to get included for the next release tell me the name and coordinates and I will add it, unless it is to small and obscure spacer

According to my records there are no outstanding bugs in the gadget now. For some reason I don’t think that will last for long, hehe.

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments »

weather 1.3.1

May 18th, 2009

Created a bugfix release for the release yesterday. Sorry about creating two releases in so short time, but tonight I finally managed to reproduce the main gadget not updating. It seems Internet Explorer is caching the windows gadget data, at least on my Windows 7 installation. This caused some problems with the main gadget showing old time. This should hopefully be fixed now.

If anyone still have this problem let me know! I also appreaciate feedback on some of my questions in my previous post.

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments »

weather 1.3.0

May 17th, 2009

Today it is 17.May and the Norwegian national day. Norwegian are always very interested in the weather for 17.May since we have big celebrations outdoors and many people plan to take out the barbecue. Not that I plan to be much outdoors today since I’m using crutches after a football injure earlier this week… arg! So since I have been spending some time indoor and to prepere us for the 17.May I have created a new release of the weather widget. Release 1.3.0 is available for download. This is big upgrade from last version so alot of code have been rewritten for this release. Some things you will notice and some “under the hood” fixes spacer Overall I’m very pleased with this release and I hope you the user will be please too.

  • Replaced the old template design with a much more versatile solution. You can now select the text and background color. The colors from the old template is still available in the color picker, in addition you can write whatever hex color code you want! Use your favorite image editor or an online color picker to select your perfect color. This should guarantee that the gadget matches any desktop background possible!
  • All old background images have been replaced with new dynamic solution using CSS. This result in a minor design difference and makes it much easier for me to add more optional flyout pages etc in the future.
  • When you add a new gadget instance it will try and retrieve the name, longitude and latitude based on your IP address! This will especially help all users not located in Norway.
  • Default language on the gadget is now based on Windows regional setting. This makes it easier for non Norwegian speaking users since they will not get Norwegian as default language like they used to.
  • The default gadget view should now get updated both when you close the settings window and the flyout. This is done so it easy to force a refresh of the widget.
  • Fixed bug that didn’t allow negative latitude and longitude.

As allways I apreaciate all feedback I get here, so write away! I’m especially curious on how getting the location based on IP works. I have done some successfull testing on IP’s from bigger cities in Norway and abroad. But I would love to get some feedback on how it work for you!. Do it get the correct location and how small towns do it manage to collect. Also if you live outside a town, what do it find?

There are still some possible errors not fixed, reported in the last version. Somtimes it do not refresh the main window. It might be related to loosing internet connection but it have not been confirmed yet. Also there are some repports that the gadgets opens the flyout out of the screen instead of into the screen like it is suposed too. My suspicions are that this is related to Windows and gadgets in general and not this spesific gadget. If anyone are able to find a way to reproduce this or other usefull feedback please let me know.

Enjoy and have an excellent 17.May celebration!

Tags: gadget, weather
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

There are no tasks defined in the “product” namespace.

April 5th, 2009

As you might know, I’m using the symfony PHP framework for many of my projects. Especially on bigger projects like filmprices.com I find it very useful.

Symfony have somthing called tasks that you can run from command line of your server. Tasks together with a cronjob would be great combination for updating the product list from the different shops in filmprices.com. So I set up a cronjob for running my product:update task looking somthing like this:

0 5 * * * ~/path/to/my/symfony/poject/symfony product:update

But I just got the following error message:

There are no tasks defined in the “product” namespace.”

The problem is that the symfony cli need to be run from the symfony project directory so it do not manage to find my product namespace. I did not find any similar examples on google so I did some basic “try and fail” with my cron script. I finally managed to get it to work with the following script:

0 5 * * * cd ~/path/to/my/symfony/poject && ./symfony product:update

When looking at the solution I guess this should have been easy for me to figure out, but I have not worked much with cronjobs earlier. So hope this helps if you ever run into a “There are no tasks defined in the “<namespace name>” namespace.” message when setting up cronjobs with symfony tasks.

As a side note you might have noticed I set up my script to only update products once a day. I will increase this for the shops that update their products lists often when I take this project out of beta. So do not worry the products and prices will be up to date!

Tags: symfony
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

weather 1.2.0

April 2nd, 2009

A new version of the weather gadget is ready for download. Just download and double click the package and it should install over the older version. To check the version just check the settings page and the version is stated at the bottom (unless you have the 1.0.0 version).

  • Possible to select hour by hour forecast instead of 9 day forecast as flyout. (requested by Steffan)
  • Increased the timer used to check for new weather forecast. No need to check for new weather forecast every few seconds spacer

Enjoy!

Tags: gadget, weather
Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments »

« Older Entries

gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.