Render fast

I updated my Greasemonkey script that replaces the Bing Map with a Google Map in Garmin Connect. This version is made faster by completely disabling the Bing Map and it no longer fetches the map information twice. Additionally, I’ve fixed the lap display markers and improved the quality of the track line.

Install Garmin Connect Google Maps Greasemonkey Script v0.2.

I have also posted Garmin Connect Google Maps at userscripts.org.

Note: For some reason I had to uninstall the old script before installing the new one–Greasemonkey didn’t seem to recognize the upgrade.

Garmin Connect, a site I use to log my runs and bike rides, switched from Google Maps to Bing Maps back in November. Bing Maps’ coverage seems generally inferior to Google Maps and I think the maps just look better on Google. Also, Bing Maps seems to apply some overly-aggressive line smoothing, making tight corners look like wide curves.

I finally got around to writing a Greasemonkey script to restore the Google Map on the dashboard and activity pages.

Here’s the link to the script:

Install Garmin Connect Google Maps Greasemonkey script.

A run I did in Kathmandu displayed on Google Maps, top, and Bing Maps, bottom.

NWSClient version 1.2 is now available for download. This version fixes a number of bugs, adds detailed hourly forecast data, and increases the size of the text in the app icon so that the temperature is more readable.

I recently upgraded my Mac to OS 10.6 and I had to rebuild Qt and PyQt to get them working again. I installed Qt 4.5.3 from source and then installed sip 4.9.1 and PyQt4.6.1. Immediately it failed to work with the following error:

>>> from PyQt4 import QtCore
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/PyQt4/QtCore.so, 2): Symbol not found: _sipQtConnect
  Referenced from: /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/PyQt4/QtCore.so
  Expected in: flat namespace
 in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/PyQt4/QtCore.so

Some quick searching led me to this post, which implied that hacking PyQt’s configure.py file to force the architecture to be 64-bit would do the trick.
So where it says:

for a in sipcfg.arch.split():
    if a == 'i386':
        qmake_archs.append('x86_64')
    elif a == 'x86_64':
        qmake_archs.append('x86_64')
    elif a == 'ppc':
qmake_archs.append('ppc')

Replace qmake_archs.append('x86') with qmake_archs.append('x86_64').
Now PyQt works again.

I’ve released a new version of NWSClient for Blackberry. New features include a link to a Google Map (if Google Maps for Blackberry is installed), and more customization options, including the option to have the current conditions and temperature displayed as the application’s name on the home screen.

The Google Map link is helpful to see where your location is relative to the current NWS weather station.

• Download version 1.18 for the Blackberry Curve or similar.
• Download version 1.19 for Blackberry Storm.

When I was developing the NWSClient I had to collect the locations of National Weather Service weather stations, radar sites, and weather forecast offices. Here is the list of weather stations in Google Earth kml format and GPX. A subset of this list, the weather forecast offices, is in GPX format and csv format.

Around 6am EDT today the current conditions XML feed stopped updating. I notified NWS and I received the following reply:

“There was a database cluster failure earlier this morning. System admins are working on the issue now. It should be available shortly.”

UPDATE: I’ve released versions 1.14 and 1.15 which fixes the problem with the decimal temperature not displaying properly.

Ugh. This has been a crazy week for my little Blackberry weather app. The National Weather Service has decided to change the formatting of their current conditions XML file. The original product description (pdf) displays the temperatures as integers, but as of this morning NWS has started pushing temperatures with an additional digit of precision. This causes the temperature in the application icon to overflow its maximum size of three digits. Some users will see “NWS” instead of the temperature and some will see “err.” To be fair, the schema for the current conditions feed  indicates temperature is a decimal type, but I naively treated all values as string data for the sake of simplicity.

I have a fix that will strip the extra digits off of the temperature for display in the application icon. I plan to release this as a new version tonight.

UPDATE 6/1/2009: The microscopic app icon problem has been resolved. The corrected version for Storm is v1.13.

UPDATE 6/1/2009: There’s a problem with the app icon appearing too small on Blackberry Storms.

Version 1.1 of my free Blackberry weather application includes the following upgrades and enhancements:

• Current conditions are displayed as the application’s rollover icon
• Links to nearest NWS radar and forecast discussions
• Links to NWS alert and warning bulletins
• The application no longer blocks when fetching weather
• Added a user preference for the minimum font size
• The location database is stored more efficiently, resulting in a smaller overall application size

This update is available for over-the-air install here.
A build for the Blackberry Storm is available here.

I’ve made a version of NWSClient for the Blackberry Storm. It is identical to version 1.0 except it has been built for OS v4.7 and the over-the-air install will not make the Storm run the application in “compatibility mode,” as it would the 1.0 version (this can be disabled in the preferences of the phone if you’ve already installed the previous 1.0 version).

Over-the-air install is here.