Pardon me while I don my Nomex.
<soapbox>
<--- It's been a bad two weeks. More'n likely I should let this pass
and go to bed early, but, well, it's been a rough two weeks. The best I
can say is, that low in the Gulf of Mexico shows no signs of becoming a
hurricane and hitting Texas. Hope y'all can take this as my attempt at
both some commentary, and a little humor --->
Joseph M. Durnal wrote:
Some things that I can do with APRSDos, like bring up a command window
to the TNC, handle NTS formatted messages
I can't think of a reason to have to get into the TNC once it's
configured, and it really should be run in KISS. What'd a terminal
window buy you there?
And, NTS traffic is not a suitable use for APRS or Xastir, IMNSHO.
Others will disagree, but NTS traffic is not nearly as important as
e-mail and file transfer. I've handled my share of NTS traffic on three
modes plus MARS message and phonepatch traffic dating back to the
Vietnam era. So, yeah, I'm an old fart, but I'm still playing with new
modes. Take a look at LinLink and the listserv surrounding it. I'm not
sure we're ever gonna solve anything but the discussion has been real solid.
(http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/APRS-docs/NTS.TXT), and not that I
can do this in APRSDos, but the ability to be able to create objects
freehand instead of being limited to what the interface will allow,
like using a different path for the object, etc. At least these are
the things that I'd add if I could write code. I suppose I should
ask, does xastir do these things already or has someone already put it
on a to do list? It is just strange that there are things that I can
do in Dos that I can do on a modern OS.
GUIs are not designed to make anything easier, necessarily, for the
user. That's a fiction we foist off on users to make them think
programmers are their friends. GUIs are designed to limit most users to
be able to do just what the GUI programmer wanted them to do.
Sometimes, that does help: It could prevent you from sending out a
pathologic packet on the channel designed to make APRSDos grind to a
halt.... As was claimed for OpenTrac a couple of years ago.
One thing to consider is this: I spend my life, now, in Linux. Most of
it is spent at the command line save for the specific applications I am
using that require some form of graphical interface because of their
overall complexity. I'm a dinosaur. I LIKE the command prompt. But I
use Xastir because it's the most full-featured APRS client out there.
Did mention I used APRSDos to track cows in the somewhat fabled
Cows-In-Space project. And displayed data back in the old days, to
sub-bovine accuracy? And was published for the effort?
</soapbox>
OK: I am now switching gears and asking for opinions and comments on a
vizualization product. If y'all would look at
http://mesonet.tamu.edu/scoop-cgi/ogc/wrf and give me off-list feedback,
I'd appreciate it. I'm running the WRF (community developed Weather
Research and Forecasting)model over a rather large domain, from ~40W to
~105W and ~5N to ~55N. The display is surface wind fields. The purpose
of this model is to provide 10 meter height winds and surface barometric
pressures to initialize ocean circulation and wave models, which will in
turn be used to help predict storm surge and inundation.
This group is well-known for giving pretty unabridged opinions.
Oh, yeah. After a week of messing with settings and recovering from a
multi-disk failure on a raid shelf, we've got a new 8TB volume up and
have the WSR88D radar mosaics back up for your overlay pleasure. In the
middle of that, my sys admin left for a new job and I'm _really_ back on
the command line on Linux!
73 gerry
--
Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
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