Fax crawler, for SailMail users

I wanted to get something more dynamic for the patterns that can be used at sea...

When ashore, no problem, the faxes are pulled out from the Internet.

At sea, that's different, you have GetFax (from SailMail) downloading the faxes from the SSB onto your hard drive, and when it's about putting the faxes together in a composite, that used to be a painful experience, you had to locate the faxes one by one... Baaaaad.

There is now a new kind of dynamic pattern. If the protocol used to get the fax(es) is not http, then there is a surprise. There is a "search:" protocol implemented like in:

search:chartview.util.SearchUtil.findMostRecentFax(".*500.*", "${fax.path}")

That allows the soft to crawl the directory where the faxes are downloaded.

It does not look that friendly, but that is quite powerful, and extendable. After the "search:" keyword is the name of the Java class and method used to find the right fax. That method must be static, take two String parameters, and return a String value, that's all. The first parameter is a regular expression to match the description of the fax to find. SailMail appropriately stores this information when a fax is downloaded through GetFax... The second parameter is the root directory to start the search from, to find the most recent, matching the regular expression pattern. In the example above, it is the value of the path stored in the Weather Wizard preferences.

It is extendable in the sense that you can write your own crawlers, in Java. It just needs to be put in the classpath.

The same kind of syntax and method is available for the GRIBs as well.

search:chartview.util.SearchUtil.findMostRecentFile(".*\.(grb|grib)$", "${grib.path}")

The idea when at sea is to have GetFax running in "auto" mode for a while, and then to use this kind of composite pattern in the Weather Wizard. This way, this rendering is just one - I said "one" - click away:

Even fuzzy faxes make sense. Click the image... Cool!

To learn how to use this feature the best way, just Google "Regular Expression", this is soooooooooooo kewl!

Contour detection

I just finished big improvements in the contour detection of the GRIBs. The performances are now correct (a few milliseconds per GRIB layer, for a full Pacific GRIB 2 degrees by 2 degrees).
Now the contour detection can be part of a GRIB Animation.
In addition, there are now new check boxes to show and hide already computed contour lines, just like for the faxes.
The picture shows PRMSL and 500HGT contours detected in a South Pacific GRIB. Notice that there is now an option to show only the detected contours (with no wind or other GRIB data).

Archives 2009 available

From this page, you can now reach several kinds of archives, along with real-time data. We had in the past the composites archives - which can be opened and rendered by the Weather Wizard - we now have images generated after the composites, they can be visualized from your browser.

Check out this link for details.

Color Faxes

We can now integrate color faxes, like this one.
It is a bit special in the sense that

• It's a square projection (Anaximandre)
• It is in several colors.

Anaximandre never was a problem, but the multiple colors is something that was not managed.
We now have the possibility to just make a fax transparent, without changing the black to another color (which is a possibility that still remains).
Having the colored fax transparent allows as usual superimposition with other data, like GRIBs or charts.
We can produce a rendering like this:
Some improvements in the image processing have been done too, regarding the transparency, and the sharp and blur. Looks much nicer. I had the idea of doing it by looking at what OpenCPN was doing for their charts rendering, which is much nicer than Maptech, based on the same data files.

Externalizing the Look and Feel option

The possibility to apply a Swing Look and Feel on the UI has been externalized. You can apply any Look and Feel you want, its name will be mentioned in the command-line, or in the shortcut properties. That brings more flexibility to the user, and cuts the dependencies with the providers.
On the right is an example of what's possible, using the "Napkin" Look and Feel.
The default look and feel is the System one, not the Metal one (Java default).
Those who have already installed the program should re-install it, as some modifications in the launching script were made.

Mercator Templates

Using the ChartComponents package, I generated some Mercator Templates (aka Mercator Plotting Sheets) that can be used for celestial navigation. They're available as pdf documents in different sizes: 11" x 8½", 11" x 17" and 17" x 22".
The Letter format (11" x 8.5"), which is quite small. I need to try it to make sure this is not too small. I reduced on all versions the latitude span to 3 degrees (instead of 6, on the charts published by the French SHOM, format ½ Grand Aigle), for the definition of a mile not to be too small.

Contour detection in the GRIB

Some areas, like south Pacific, south Atlantic, are apparently not covered by weather faxes, but it is possible to retrieve GRIB files for those regions, as they are computed using a model. In order to have on those binary data a view equivalent to what the weather charts would be showing, it is necessary to detect the contour lines from the GRIB, about the PRMSL, 500mb, waves heights, temperature, or whatever data the GRIB would contain. This is now done, and here is the rendering it makes. I'm not sure the algorithm wouldn't deserve some improvements (actually, I'm sure it will), but it seems to render the data I'm expecting. Click the image (top-right) to enlarge it.
Just for fun, you can also superimpose the contour lines with their equivalent faxes, to see if it matches...
That should be very useful for the areas not covered by the faxes.