- Saturday, 1.
July, 2006
Cloud map data
reception problems:
The satellite receiving
station is having problems. This is the cause of frequent white banding
in the cloud cover. Until the situation has improved I will be using
a low-res cloud image from the University of Wisconsin.
Real Meteosat
Image of Europe
Thanks to NERC Satellite Station, Dundee University, Scotland,
I can now use the color image from Meteosat. The image is now also
accessible from the screensavers and desktops.
- Saturday, 10.
June, 2006 #########
mailing list update #############
New World Cup
2006 Screensaver:
For the duration
of the Soccer World 2006 I've issued a special screensaver. The free
saver doesn't just display a map of World Cup Germany 2006, but also
all the other wonderfull views which this site has to offer...
- Wednesday, 7.
June, 2006
Bug removals:
The scripts which
run this website have reached a complexity which is breathtaking.
It occasionaly happens that some features don't work exactly as expected.
2 "errors" were caused by a change in the behaviour of the
rented webserver which hosts my website: image synchronizations after
midnight didn't work. The images in question: number of active
hurricanes and
Global Temperatures
are now "forced to update".
German weather forecasts not working
The World Meteorological
Organization assures me that the missing forecasts of Germany are
due to a temporary computer glitch.
- Sunday, 5.
June, 2006 ######### mailing list update #############
Addition of movies to the screensavers:
3 movies are now accesible via the new dropdown menus in the screensavers.
Saturday, 3.
June, 2006
Unfortunately,
the server generating this website appeared to have have been hacked.
The website did not update for 14 hours this Saturday, because the
server would not boot up anymore.
Actually, this was caused by a RAM failure which simulated the deletion
of NTOSKRNL.EXE in both winnt/system32 and winnt/dllcache.
In trying to locate and repair the fault I not only drove 100 miles
back and forth to the server location, but had to reformat the hard
disk and try to restore the server system a couple of times
The web service is now mostly restored.
Thursday,
24. May, 2006
 First
Movie Snippet Online:
the first few seconds of the amazing movie "The Earth From
The Sun - Distant" can be downloaded here:
Webcam
Movies
Thursday, 11.
May, 2006
Paid Screensavers:
The screensavers
are now updated to the same menuing system as the free screensavers.
Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 upgrades:
As it looks now,
IE7 does not support Active Desktops. That means that the Wallpapers
can't work anymore, should you want to use Windows Internet Explorer
7.
If you plan on using Windows Vista, when it is released sometime
next year, don't be the first one to rush and buy a licence if you
want to use the wallpapers from this website.
I will first have to go and buy myself a copy of the Windows Vista
Release, to figure out how to use widgets to provide the same or
similar service.
Bug fix:
The spoken earthquake
alerts where off by one hour in announcing the quake times. This
was due to an error in the script files reading the time from the
system clock (summer time issue). Error is fixed.
Thursday, 4.
May, 2006
European Mediterreanean Seismological Service:
The EMSC decided
to change the design of its web pages. The data-extraction routines
of my website had to be adjusted to the new format.
Internet Explorer
7 Beta 2:
To try and keep
the Active Desktops going I have changed the formatting of the XML
files.
Saturday, 22.
April, 2006
Free Screensavers: Updated program files!
To fix the screensaver
crashes caused by the new menuing system you can now download a
new program version of the screensavers (download
from here). Simply download your chosen version
and install over the old screensaver.
Thursday, 20.
April, 2006
Free Screensavers: change to the menuing system
The new menuing
system is finally online. It is now possible to access every view
from every screensaver. This system will be transferred to the pay
versions of the screensavers, too.
Monday, 10.
April, 2006
Website: Improved Speed
After many useless
emails and a couple of successless phone calls I finally managed
to convince the service dept. to increase the number of simultanous
connections. The website now loads FAST, the way it should be, to
reach the claimed 70 Terabyte of transfer capacity per month.
Menuing
system
I'm still working
on it. I've frankly underestimated the amount of work and number
of pages involved.
Tuesday, 4.
April, 2006
New Menuing system for active desktops and screensavers
The new menu
system scheme almost got derailed by the fact of it's reliance on
activated Javascript on my users browsers.
That was until I realized that it isn't possible to see anything
at all in the wallpapers and screensavers, when Javascript is turned
off. The reason: the script which is used since two years to resize
the images to fit any given monitor resolution.
Therefore I
will start introducing the new unified menuing system probably today
(on the wallpaper/screensaver items) and for the webpages a non-javascript
alternative will be provided.
Friday, 31.
March, 2006
Announcement of change to the menu system
The whole menu
system for the wallpapers and screensavers (both free and paid for)
is a catastrophy. The menus were originally designed to link to
a maximum of 2 or 3 additional pages. It means that when I add just
one addtional feature page, I need to change the design of roughly
80 web pages individually. The maintenance of the webpages is therefore
more time-intensive than the time required to develop a new item
(such as soccer-results).
I will therefore start adding a more simple dropdown navigation
menu, like tried first on the Bundesliga pages (http://satellite.ehabich.info/fussballdeutschland.htm).
New Sponsor
test
Despite having
12.000 visitors on the free desktop backgrounds every day (600 per
hour) I am not earning any money from this feature. To try and raise
at least a bit of money I have added on some pages hotel.de
as a sponsor.
My experience with this hotel-booking group as a private customer
was very good. I have also compared prices and offers with other
hotel reservation sites, and I find hotel.de
personally to offer the best value and quality hotels.
During the winter months my girlfriend and me booked a five star
(!) hotel through hotel.de
in the EU quarter of Brussels. The reduced price was € 55 Euro
for 2 for one night (Friday to Saturday).
Wednesday,
29. March, 2006 ######### mailing list update #############
Server Online Again
The server is
online again after 6 hours of outage.
Tuesday, 28.
March, 2006 ######### mailing list update #############
Major Server Outage
Since about 20h
GMT there has been a complete server outage from my Internet Server
Provider. Because T-Online's service website itself has been down,
it wasn't even possible to ask them about the reason for this.
Mirror Website opefs.com
The mirror website
has been set up. Unfortunately this doesn't mean that the screensavers
or wallpapers work again, but at least a minimum website service
is available again. The updates on the mirror site are limited to
once every 60 minutes.
Monday, 27.
March, 2006
Annoying daylight savings time
It would be so
nice if there was no daylight savings time. As it is, virtually
every continent changes their clocks at a different date and time
back and forth (see for example http://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst2006a.html.
The effect is doubtful, as some studies show that daylight savings
time actually leads to a higher energy consumption, as there would
be by leaving the clocks the way alone.
To simplify matters I have replaced the partially wrong times of
capitals (which otherwise need to be maually adjusted every 6 months)
with a temperature and wind marker.
Ayers Rock, Australia, reporting again
The met station
at Ayers Rock is sending data again. Therefore it has been included
in the maps again.
Major update to the free wallpapers (active desktops)
All free active desktop wallpapers have been linked together.
Pricing change
to the active desktops
Active desktops and screensavers now cost the same, ie. $ 9.99 US
Dollar, resp. € 6.30 Euro.
A request
There are still many hundred users out there who did not re-install
their desktops in the last few weeks. This means that the website
still slows down every 20 minutes, starting at the full hour.
Please do re-install if you haven't already done so.
Thursday, 2.
March, 2006 ######### mailing list update #############
Major update to the paid wallpapers (active desktops)
Pretty much every
desktop is now linked to every other available desktop view.
Changes to
the existing paid wallpapers.
Various bugfixes, all to do with links opening new windows in a
browser, instead of changing the wallpaper background.
Tuesday, 28.
February, 2006
Ayers Rock, Australia, not reporting anymore
Since 12. February
or so there are no new temperature data for this Australian landmark.
For that reason I've taken that weather station out of the display
of current temperatures.
Zero temperatures in the middle of Africa
You may have
noticed unseasonally low 0 Degree Celsius at Entebbe Airport, Uganda.
The cause of that was not an impending new ice age, but a buggy
script and a rounding error. (When a station did not report a temperature,
the non-result was rounded to "0", hence 0 Degrees). Fixed.
Global Near
Realtime Display of Temperatures
That new screen
has been added. It will be worked into the existing wallpapers and
screensavers.
Sunday, 26.
February, 2006
Repairing the USGS Earthquake feed
USGS has changed
the RSS feed data format. The result was that the USGS "green
quake alert" did not function. The issue is now fixed. Lovely.
- Saturday, 25.
February, 2006
Regarding re-installing wallpapers (users who installed before
12. Feb. 2006)
By re-installing
the update times are randomized (within 20 minutes), so that the
background refreshes faster. It is therefore recommended to update
the program.
The new schedule also doesn't switch back the chosen screen to the
start screen (presently the choices are Standard screen, Forecast
and Spoken Alerts).
In future, if
you choose "Spoken Alerts" for example,
the alerts will remain active until the option "Silent"
is especially selected.
-
Wednesday,
22.
February,
2006
Changes
to
the
"speaking"
pages
of
the
free
World
Screensaver
Accidentally
the
wrong
method
of
invoking
the
audio
files
was
used,
possible
leading
to
crashes
of
the
screensaver
when
using
voice.
Issue
is
fixed.
Changes
to
the
paid
"View
From
Sun"
desktop
and
free
webpages
"Distant
Earth"
view
and
more
options
added.
Connection
Problems
Germany's
largest
internet
service
provider
has
routing
problems
in
many
areas.
Hopefully
they
are
now
resolved.
Change
in
connectivity,
mirror
site
The
domain
http://opefs.com
is
now
hosted
by
an
independent
ISP
in
USA,
whilst
http://opefs.com
is
hosted
in
Germany.
Presently
opefs.com
is
just
a
forwarding
page.
But
I
plan
to
make
it
a
fully
functional
mirror
domain,
except
that
the
picture
updates
will
be
much
less
frequent.
Monday,
20. February, 2006
Changes to the Virtual Cities page
More cities have been added.
Changes to the number of features
on screensavers and desktop items
The number of options is being increased.
Changes to the options of the
Asian Pages
The full compliment of options (2D
/ 3D, Forecast 3D, Hurricanes, Alerts
EMSC, USGS) is added.
Sunday,
12. February, 2006
Change to the method the Active
Desktops (wallpapers) are updated
Since the transfer of my domain
to the new server it has taken much
longer to refresh the wallpaper screen.
It sometimes took 2 minutes and for
a very long periods it just showed
a white screen.
That was not good.
The reason for the long and slow updates
is the channel definition definition
file (CDF) format given by Microsoft.
I had only the option of enabling
every user to download the newest
images at the same time as every other
user. Which meant that between 650
and 2000 people simutanously all downloaded
a 250 kb image. That was a bit much
for my new server.
It is unexplained why there should
be such a dramatic slowdown however.
Because my old server handled this
server load quite nicely.
In any case, I no longer use the synchronization
manager from Microsoft to download
the latest images from my server.
Instead a simple javascript is employed.
That means that every user of the
desktop wallpaper will be downloading
at a different time. Like that the
server load is now evenly distributed.
Problems which sometimes occured with
malfunctions with mobsync.exe are
now also avoided (sometimes, for unknown
reasons, mobsync.exe went into overdrive
permanently, causing 100% CPU load
interminably, until a user re-installed
his OS).
If the desktop does not immediately
show the latest image available, then
please right-click on the desktop
and choose "synchronize now"
(aktualisieren).
Thursday,
9. February, 2006
Change to German Quikscat Antarctic Iceberg page:
the explanation for the Quikscat data has now been
translated into German.
Tuesday,
7.February, 2006
Change
to active desktops:
the hurricane page has been linked, beginning with the
two most popular desktops Europe and America and Australia.
The desktops America, American Crescent, Europe and European
Crescent are now identical in features (except for the
Fahrenheit/Celsius switch, which is unique to US screens.).
Error correction:
clicking on the "Spoken Alerts" of the active
desktop wallpaper did open up a new browser window to
speak the earthquake alert. That was not supposed to happen
and its fixed now.
retouching Blue
Marble :
a white line was deleted, which NASA left on the right border of the
image.
Friday, 3.February,
2006
Change
to the hurricane page:
mousing over a preview of the hurricanes reveals the cloud
cover.
Wednesday,
1.February, 2006
Change to
the hurricane link:
the number (if any) of active hurricanes is shown in the link
leading to the hurricane watch page.
Monday, 30.January, 2006
Changes to the American screensavers:
It is now possible to switch between all views of the region,
2D, 3D and hurricane pages, as well as quake alerts.
Changes to the Hurricane Watch pages:
the standard zoom view now shows cloud cover. Like that it is
at possible to see the area of the hurricane and the extent, not
just the symbol for the hurricane.
Unfortunately the resolution of the cloud map at such a high zoom
level is not very good.
You can also change to a cloudless close-up view of the hurricane
area.
With fast moving hurricanes there can be discrepancies of the
hurricane symbols and the displayed cloud images.
-
Sunday,
29.January, 2006
Changes to the European and European Crescent screensavers:
It
is now possible to switch between all views of the region, 2D, 3D
and hurricane pages, as well as quake alerts. Unfortunately this
feature has not yet been ported to the pay savers.
I am working on a concept and the tech for a unified screensaver,
which can switch between and remember all views that this website
has to offer.
#################
Mailing list update ##################
- Saturday, 28.January,
2006
The old changelog and the old forum are gone forever.
I just restored the old mailing list and changelog from a backup of
the database which I made, before my old webhost installed his new
server. I used to have 40 GB traffic inclusive there every month.
Unfortunately, they accidentally completely deleted my website, opefs.com,
during the move.
They wrote this:
Dear Customer,
We are not able to find your account, we recently moved our servers
and
might have the details in backup. We will go ahead and search in
the
old backup.. if we found we will replace it
If we found we
will replace it...? Unfortunately, they have not found yet until now...
All this happened as I was in the process of moving the website to
my new host,
T-Online. I have now rented a whole server with 80 Gb diskspace for
myself, which puts a stop to the annoying problem of always running
out of diskspace, because someone else on the shared server exceeds
their quota, or because the domain host cuts his calculation too sharp.
It was important for me not to run out of diskspace.
Every time the server ran out of diskspace I could not upload the
images properly anymore. This problem happened very frequently lately,
like once per week.
Customer service had already stopped responding to my complaints,
after the 3rd or 10th time, I can't remember.
That's why I decided to switch hosts.
Not only does the new server now have a lot of disk space, (and its
all for OPEFS), we now also have 2000 Gigabyte of transfer volume
inklusive every month. Yes, 2 terabyte of transfer monthly. That should
go a long way.Hotlink protection
to conserve bandwidth is no longer an issue. You can all reset your
Norton firewalls again. Not that you need to...
2 Terabyte of inclusive data transfer at a fixed cost will provide
me (and you) with peace of mind that OPEFS can expand in the future
and offer new services.
The transfer from one webhost to the other did take longer than expected.
The website was offline for one week, from Monday 16. January, to
Sunday 22. January.
During that time a emergency website service was available at http://opefs.com.
You could have visited the website there during the five or six days
the transfer took. (It was lucky that opefs.com worked. Because only
one nameserver was active, (by regulation it must be a minimum of
2 active nameservers)).
- What else happened
since 24. December?
A new home server for generating the images has been purchased.
The upgrade is from 1.2 Ghz to 2.8 Ghz. The machine runs 24/7.
- A new domain
name is added: http://opefs.de
. Not really important, but I had one free domain name included in
the hosting package. opefs.de is presently just a forwarding URL..
- Various bugs
have been fixed:
Earthquake alerts now always
work for Europe.
The forecasting scripts on the home server now get terminated properly,
when a weather station does not send a report.
Various other scripts now also get terminated properly. As a result
I don't have to restart the server periodically, because it no longer
runs out of memory.
Australia and
Africa webpages have been improved, by giving more options to change
fast between the different screens.
Links to the
changelog are fixed.
The wallpaper
shop was broken due to the server move. Fixed. (Thanks Harvey).
- A bug in the
cloud display of Africa and Australia has been fixed. (Was too pixelated).
-
Saturday, 24.December
2005
Merry Christmas to all.
-The weather forecasting service has been repaired.#################
Mailing list update ##################
Friday, 23.December 2005
-A few days ago the World Meteorological Organization decided to
change the formatting of its webpages.
As a result most forecast data are missing.
Because not all webpages of the WMO have been changed in the same
manner, it is difficult to change the script needed to display the
data on opefs.com. I'm working
on a new universal script to take care of the problem.
But since it's Christmas, I don't know how long it will take.But it will
be fixed.Monday, 19.December
2005
-NEW: The current (within the last hour) direction of the wind is
shown by an arrow. I think this is a feature which has been lacking
for a long time, because this information makes it possible to make
informed guesses about the coming weather... -Since the wind
direction feature was added a bugfix was made: if there is no clear
wind direction (variable wind direction), then no arrow is shown.Wednesday, 14.December
2005
-NEW: this website now uses "Blue Marble: the next generation"
images from NASA, to portray the changing seasons of the planet.
Every month a different earth map is displayed, which shows the
changing colors of the vegetation and changes in ice coverage globally.Credit: NASA';s
Earth Observatory#################
Mailing list update ##################
Monday, 12. December 2005
-For greater cross-browser compatibility I've changed the method
of embedding the earthquake sound alerts in the web pages.Now a RealPlayer
plugin is required. My webpages also change in response to a patent
dispute between Eolas, the University of California and Microsoft.
-Trying to implement
the changes in the screensaver application didn't quite work as
expected, but led to software crashes in the application.
I've reverted to the old method of embedding sound in the screensaver
software, until a better method is found. Saturday, 10.
December
-A few bug fixes: the couple of the spoken quake announcements of
the desktops did not work, but they do now.-The paid EU
wallpaper has been upgraded for existing customers to include quake
announcements.Thursday, 8.
December
-A few bug fixes: double negative degrees are now shown on the weather
forecast pages (previously any temperature below -9 Celsius was
not displayed)-When a new
month starts the spoken quake time should no longer be in the negative
figures (ie. "the last quake was minus 44 thousand minutes
ago")- the forecast
script runs now without crashing every time, which means I can leave
the server unattended for longer periods (errors in end of file
reads and string constants in integer inputs fixed)Thursday, 1.
December
- New icons for the most current earthquakes (not older than 2 hours)
have been added. - The explanation
pages have been updated accordingly.- The German
translations for the relevant items are added.- Now is tommorow
(see below), and the Earthquake date and time bugs are patched.
- Fixed a bug
in the display of the new moon insets.- A new bug
has surfaced in the Earthquake announcements:
when the month changes over the time tracking gets confused.
I'll be fixing that error tommorrow.#################
Mailing list update ##################
Wednesday, 30. November
- Fixed a critical bug in the Earthquake announcements for Europe,
EMSC.- There are
now two independent sources for the spoken Earthquake announcements:
USGS and EMSC. USGS specializes in reporting American events, whereas
more European quakes are covered by EMSC.Monday, 28.
November
-Several optimizations have been made on the webpages.
The main difference being that its now possible to access a wider
range of views in a more logical and easy manner.-"3D"
weather forecasts are now available.- The previously
fairly flaky display of the moonphases has been updated.Monday,7.November
2005
-The Hurricane Watch page http://satellite.opefs.com/hurricane-watch.htm
has now its final form and function:1. When there
are no hurricanes the displays are changed to "No Data".
2. The names of the storms are now legible in the preview.
3. Negative latitudes (hurricanes below the equator) are now also
displayed.-The Virtual
City "Galway, Ireland" is online.
Thursday,12.October 2005
-Icebergs which are above Latitude 62° South are now displayed
on most views. Wednesday,12.October
2005
-My plan to use a different voice in the webpage is on hold.
The licensing cost, but mostly the considerable loss of sound quality
for web streaming make me decide against it. The plan is
anyways to have a silent voice (no announcements) when nothing happens.
- The RSS feed
from which the voice is fed is time delayed. Most users will never
notice this, but it isn't quite good enough for a near-realtime
reporting service. I will observe the situation further, and may
switch the feed.Tuesday,11.October
2005
-It's incredible that it has really been almost one month since
I updated this page. Because during that time quite a few things
have happened:1: an Antarctic
iceberg tracking page has been added.
2: spoken announcement technology is being added. Presently I'm
using the method to announce earthquakes.I'm still searching
for a more suitable speech-engine, than the sometimes hard-to-understand
"Mary". However, it's not entirely cheap to aquire
the necesarry distribution and/or broadcast licence from the TTS
(text to speech) manufacturers. Three systems are under closer review:1. Acapela (http://demo.acapela-group.com/)
2. Cepstral (http://cepstral.com)
3. ATT Natural Voices (http://www.wizzardsoftware.com/att_demo.php)
-A couple of errors prevented the correct display of the weather
forecasts:1: the fact
that some countries suddenly stop producing forecasts for the World
Meteorological Organization, plus the fact that I initialized an
error handler wrongly, led to American Forecasts not updating for
a few days.
I don't bite if someone writes to me to complain about errors like
this.
I don' live in the US, hence I don't check the weather forecasts
there periodically.2: A similar
error prevented the correct display of the forecast date: because
only the last forecast is representative of the date for all forecasts,
and sometime the last forcast is not up-to-date (website not updating)
the wrong forecast date was displayed (even though the forecast
was correct, even though for a different day).Monday,12.September
2005
- The Satellite Picture Receiving Station had a technical error.
That has been fixed. However, my standard source of cloud images
is not online anymore, therefore I'm using a fallback situation.The images I
presently receive have image artifacts near the Pole regions.-Weather forecasts
are now time-stamped in preparation for extended forecasting.Monday,5.September
2005
-In the views of North America it is now possible to switch between
the temperature display in either Celsius or Fahrenheit. That change
has been applied to all items.-Users of the
screensaver North America can now use Weather Forecasts.
-User of the screensaver North American Crescent can now switch
between Celsius and Fahrenheit.Thursday,1.September
2005
-The download of the weather forecasts for America and Europe is
now separated. That became necessary because of different update
intervals, and the time difference.Wednesday,31.August
2005
-The update to the earthquake data is complete. Small quakes from
European seismological centres are now added. All quakes are now
shown in yellow, as previous. Because of the overlap of some data,
the same quake may be drawn a couple of times.Friday,26.August
2005
-The earthquake reporting has been enhanced by adding a list of
the latest , unedited earthquakes of the past 24 hours from the
United States Geological Survey.To my surprise,
that earthquake list is far from complete, outside of the USA. For
example, yesterday a 3.6 Richter quake happened in densily populated
Germany, which USGS is not reporting. It appears almost that consequently,
the quake does not get coverage in the German media either. Quakes
also happened in Afghanistan (Richter 5.1), and in the Mediterranean.
To cover those
non-US areas I will incorporate the European EMSC institute in OPEFS
earthquake overview and analysis screen.To my knowledge
that makes OPEFS the first global near-real time earthquake reporting
tool?-To make the
displays less cluttered, the overview pages are seperated into the
various data-channels= earthquakes, weather forecasts, incidents,
hurricanes, volcanoes, etc...Several more
data channels are in the works.
Monday,22.August 2005
-I've robustified the algorythm to extract weather forecasts. The
service ought to be more reliable in future.-I'm not overwhelmed
by the work of the seismic analyst working on the near realtime
earthquake list I'm using. Since only certain criteria are updated
in 5 minute intervals, such important local events as a 4.2 quake
in Italy is ommited. I'll create
a blend of immediate near realtime 24h reporting of quakes, with
the analysts work.-Work on the
planned stock-exchange and iceberg display system will need to wait
for that.Tuesday,9.August
2005
-It appears that the available Keppler TLE's do not immediately
reflect changes (such as the landing of the Space Shuttle).For future space
missions I will extract the orbital data therefore from the relevant
mission control pages of NASA direct.-Several tweaks
have been added and small errors have been removed from the website.
-A new splash
page has been added for http://opefs.com.
-Screensavers and wallpapers for North America and Europe have now
a built-in link for the weather forecasts (not the 3D views, yet).
-the database for weather forecasts North America has been extended.Saturday, 30.
July 2005
- Well, whilst upgrading the forum from v. 2.0.11 to 2.0.17 the
backup turns out not to be compatible with the backup. All topics
have unfortunately been deleted. I can't restore from the previous
backup. Friday, 29.
July 2005
- I finished moving house, and the server is at the new location.
- Weather forecasts are being extended.Monday, 20.June
2005
- Today I added a script to do a daily restart of the server on
which this website is running. Unfortunately, there was a slight
misconfiguration, and the computer rebooted every 1.5 hours until
it hung.That's the reason
the website did not do updates for about 7 hours today.- I wrongly
named the jpg image for the American weather forecast. Hopefully
I got it right finally.- The weather
forecast data will be extended still, for North- and South America.Wednesday, 8.June
2005
- Weather forecasts are being added now.
Thursday, 12.May 2005
- Global temperature data have been added, which are updated every
hour. Scripts have been fully debugged.Saturday, 2.April
2005
-I'm progressing on incorporating current temperature data on the
maps.
Presently Europe, North America and Australia are ready. Asia is
in progress.- I've robustified
the script for the earthquake data.- The background
of the 3D or Crescent views of the Earth have been modified to include
the corona of the Earth's Atmosphere.Friday, 18.March
2005
The website can now be reached under http://opefs.com (Our Planet
Earth From Space).- The World
Meteorological Organization agrees for me to use their Weather icons
and forecasts. I also have an official source for current global
temperature data. I will make an effort to integrate these data
into the map displays in the future.-Some stupid
fools had made fun for themselves by running a robot and hacking
this forum. The forum has been restored now, and upgraded. Friday, 11.February
2005
-The weather satellite feeds have been restored.Thursday, 10.
February 2005
-The Global Incidents Map has been made clickable, or "zoomable".
-The Dundee Satellite Receiving Station appears to have problems
with the weather satellite feeds since yesterday. I've sent of a
couple of emails to get to the bottom of this error message:ADMIN MESSAGE
02/23 ISSUED ON 10/02/05
STATUS REPORT FOR YESTERDAY 09/02/05:
THE 1446 C6D FORMAT WAS INTERRUPTED.Thursday, 13.
January 2005
-I have added the ability to track Global calamities, "Global
Incidents".
Those tracking markers are not placed on the "3D"
or "Crescent" views on this website. The markers
are also missing from a series of other pages, nevertheless every
region of the globe is covered.The reason of
this website is to provide information of Global conditions on Earth
from an elevated viewpoint, be it cloud cover, earthquakes, tropical
storms, etc.In doing this
the Earth often shows it's beauty. But, despite people having complained
about the uglyness of the volcano (icons) or earthquake icons for
example, living on Earth has its dangers.Some of those
dangers are caused by geological processes, others are our own making.For my own purpose,
I only wanted to get a quick overview of the situation on Earth
as a whole, to get a grasp of impending dangers, which might be
fundamental to survival.Sunday, 26.
December 2004
-Because of the current events I've completed the Asian wallpapers.
Over 10.000 casualties were caused by an unprecedented series of
Earthquakes, amongst them a quake with strength 8.9 on the Richter
scale.Friday, 24.
December 2004
-Merry Christmas everyone, this website celebrates its first Birthday.Tuesday, 21.
December 2004
- My webhost http://radish.net did a major hardware upgrade last
week.
As a result the DNS servers were offline for 2 days and the website
disappeared for 3 days total. Hopefully the service will now be
without further hitches and annoyances. -The forum was
restored today, the database was reconnected by performing a software
upgrade.Wednesday, 17.
November 2004
- The cause of the mysteriously re-appearing old cloud picture was
located: a number of servers simply stopped updating the cloud pictures
at irregular intervals. After three car journeys back home on the
weekends and 500 miles later I've written a script to remotely change
the image servers.- Good news
from the satellite update front: a server providing the
location for a number of space objects has resumed operations. - I have split
up my computer system at home to create two independent servers,
which will run (partially in parallel) from different ISP's. That
should eliminate the updating errors on the weekends once and for
all.- These annoying
glitches have set back my website redesign project back by a few
weeks.Tuesday, 9.
November 2004
-There've been a couple of problems since Saturday, to do with the
updating of the pictures. On Saturday until Sunday morning there
was a simple connectivity problem, caused by my ISP http://netcologne.de.
There more recent trouble is of a more mysterious nature: an old
cloud picture (Friday evening) was repeatedly fetched from somewhere
and incorporated into the latest pictures.When I manually
synchronized the picture it was up-to-date, but on automatic batch
command it would revert back to Friday evenings picture. I've now
restarted both computers and disabled a proxy program, in the hope
of having cleared an unknown file cache somewhere. The batch files
have now been running uninterrupted 11 months in public service
and this weird behaviour has never happened before.Friday, 22.
October 2004
-Now that the major views are complete, I've started the process
of optimizing the webpage for my visitors:-There were
a number of bad links, which are fixed now, first in the English
website.-The shop area
is being tieded up.-Menu items
for adding the site to the favorites folder (IE) and to send an
email to a friend from are added. -I have several
major additions in the pipeline, which will make it worthwhile to
check back here, once a while.Tuesday, 12.
October 2004
-3 new and free screensavers have been added: Asia, Asia 3D and
Australia.Saturday, 9.
October 2004
-Pictures did not update because of a server outage from Friday
night at about midnight GMT until 9am Saturday. I apologize for
any inconvenience. The issue is now fixed.Tuesday, 5.
October 2004
-The German website navigation system has been completed.Friday, 24.
September 2004
-Today the 100.000th unique visitor came to Our Planet Earth From
Space.
I thank all my visitors for making this website a success.-Until the Office
of Spaceflight at NASA can point me to a location for compact, up-to-date
Keppler Two-Line-Elements text files, I have to enter those manually
every few days by hand, to keep the position of the International
Space Station current.Tuesday, 21.
Sept. 2004
-The complete navigation for the standard Earth has been completed
in the English language. It remains to translate the new items to
German and to add a couple of missing wallpaper items and screensavers.Thursday, 9.
Sept. 2004
-Three new views of Asia are added. The new views are not linked
to wallpaper or screensavers yet.-With the help
of Hari Nair I fixed a problem with glare on the Earth From Mars
view: http://satellite.opefs.com/earthmars.htmThe glare was
caused by the Sun moving between the line of sight from Mars to
Earth: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Solar/action?sys=-Si-The large number
of batch files needed to run the site caused a memory problem, which
was fixed by re-arranging the running order of the schedule. Wednesday, 1.
September 2004
-I have added the free "Japan, China, Korea" screensaver
and wallpaper item.Tuesday, 31.
August 2004
-The US Government has implemented changes, which restrict the availability
of satellite tracking elements (TLE). Military satellites are no
longer tracked due to this change. The reliability
of the Space Station tracking remains to be seen.Wednesday, 11.
August 2004
-I'm in the process of adding the missing views of Asia, starting
with a view of Japan. I'm experimenting with the best possible view,
and haven't had time to add either screensaver or wallpaper options
yet.-I found a program
which enables me to make smooth 24fps HQ animation movies of the
various views. I'll be including a sample movie sometime in the
future. The movies will be for sale. -Picture archives
of the images are available on DVD for 2 week intervals at $10 US
Dollar plus shipping. For purchase please enquire via email until
this item is added to the online shop.Monday, 9. August
2004
-I've changed the server for the weather patterns this morning at
05:15 GMT. The cloud formations are now updating again.Sunday, 8. August
2004
-The weather patterns are not updating since Friday, because the
image server in Korea is offline: http://home.megapass.co.kr/~ykim59/cloud_data/clouds_2048.jpgI'll be fixing
this ASAP after the return from my holidays on Monday morning.
Tuesday, 20.
July 2004
The forum is now officially opened.
Wednesday, 14.
July 2004
The Animation page has been fixed: Visit
the animation page . In
addition, the transitions between the frames are now morphed into
each other, making for a smoother animation effect.
Tuesday, 6.
July 2004
-I've received complaints that some users can't load images from
my website anymore.
The solution is this:
If you use Norton Internet Security or Norton Personal Firewall,
or another "referrer blocking" program you need to create
a rule to allow "Our Planet Earth From Space".
Technical Information:
How referrer information works
When you click a Web page, your browser notes the current page that
you are on and sends that information to the server of the new Web
page. This way, the server for the new Web page knows the last Web
page that you viewed.
By default, Norton Internet Security and Norton Personal Firewall
block this information. Some Web sites require this information
before they allow you to see their pages.
For detailed
instructions go to the Norton
website!
Thursday, 1.
July 2004
-New view available: Middle East and India. Ready now as webpage,
wallpaper and screensaver.
-Thanks goes to Tina, for translating the German "Wallpaper"
and "Wallpaper Shop" pages.
Wednesday, 30
June, 2004
-Since a German
webservice provider (perhaps unwittingly) broke the Creative Commons
licence and used my images in his commercial program I am forced
to enable hot-link protection on this server. The program that the
German webservice provider used, stole up to 9% of my entire webtraffic.
-The links page
is completed (because it was necessary to allow hotlinking from
friendly sites I had to make a complete list).
If you wish to hotlink to my images from your website or forum,
then please tell me your URL.
Wednesday, 23
June, 2004
-
Improved screensaver version available:
Connection
is now via commercial webserver and no longer dependend on dynamic
DNS services. Please go to http://satellite.opefs.com/aboutscreensaver.html
for the download.
The reason that the original screensavers were routed via DynDNS
to my server at home were historic: I wanted to keep a close watch
on the bandwidth, and if necessary block excessive downloads.
-For the
first time my allocated bandwidth of 40 GB per month was exceeded
yesterday.
Tuesday, 22.
June 2004
-The issue with the bandwidth excess has been resolved.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
-The website has been turned off, and displays an error message
citing bandwidth excess as the cause. I'm trying to get in touch
with the responsible ISP in America.
I had asked before I signed up if it was possible to pay for excess
bandwidth, as needed, therefore I don't understand their action.
Thursday, 10.
June 2004
-I have changed the connection method for the dynamic DNS program,
which occasionally glitched.
Tuesday, 1.
June 2004
-This website has received a bandwidth upgrade, which makes it possible
to upload the latest satellite images to the image server twice
as fast. This means that users of the "The World" wallpapers
are no longer 40 minutes behind the current time, but instead just
20 minutes.
The upgrade also means that I can add a few more satellite views.
-The website has been up and running without interruptions for over
two weeks.
Monday, 17.
May 2004
-I'm not quite sure what happened on the weekend, but it appears
a buffer overflow made the server to be "out of memory",
which caused the website to be offline for a good portion of the
weekend. I believe I have found the program which caused this error.
I hope this trouble is not connected with a fault in the recent
Microsoft "Security Updates".
Thursday, 13.
May 2004
-After a request I've added two more views: South America and South
American Crescent
-Today I've also had a request to add a view of Asia. I'll do that
next week.
-The increasing number of views means that I'll have to change the
navigation of this site somewhat, soon.
Friday, 7. May
2004
-I've added another IDE hardrive to the disk array of the image
processing machine.
That will make it easier to restore the system in case of a HD crash,
because the SCSI array wasn't compatible with the back-up software
I use.
Wednesday, 28.
April 2004
-Today there was an interruption of service with my ISP, Netcologne,
which caused the wallpapers (and the old website) to be offline
for two hours. Sorry for any inconvenience.
-I used the disconnection to restore the HD of the webserver, and
now my wallpapers work again (I had lost my Active Desktop after
installing PC Anywhere).
Thursday, 22.
April 2004
-I've taken some time to add two new requested views:
11: Natural Earth Map
12: Africa
Wednesday, 21.
April 2004
-Because of the rising number of visitors I've transfered the entire
website to the webserver in USA. After all, there is only so much
traffic an 1048kb ADSL connection can handle. The 450 unique visitors
per hour on Sunday did push the connection limit.
Not only will the connectivity be improved in case the image processing
machine or webserver in Germany goes down, but it will also free
up my Internet connection again.
-A side effect of an Microsoft security update was that I lost my
active desktop. Therefore I'm really itching to re-install Windows
on my present webserver machine again (Sarcasm-Alert). I will be
able to do this maybe in about a week, when the majority of users
have updated their bookmarks to the new domain name.
Monday, 19.
April 2004
-The site is running smoothly.
-Over 450 unique visitors visited the homepage in one hour on Sunday
the 18th. April, between 17:30 - 18:30, which is a new all-time
visitor record. Thank you.
Thursday, 15.
April 2004
- I restored the webserver from a backup, just in time to see that
the BBC is running a feature on this website on its "Click
Online" programme: http://www.bbcworld.com/content/clickonline_archive_15_2004.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=6
-Because of a Microsoft Security Update, and the misfortune of letting
windows choose an updated (but wrong) version of a network adapter,
there were a few updating errors and connectivity issues from about
17h GMT until 23h GMT.
Thursday, 8.
April 2004
There are some
connectivity issues at present with the image server in US, I have
received the following explanation:
As you may be aware, service have been significantly interrupted
on more than one occasion over the past 5 days. This evening, the
server your account resides on was migrated to a new IP address
and network carrier connection. We can promise and ensure better
uptime from this move and apologize for any inconveniences.
Friday, 2. April
2004
-My apologies, because the image server in California was offline
between 23:56 GMT and 10:53 GMT, due to connection trouble beyond
my control. When something like that happens the main webserver
in Germany does remain online, so you can check the Server Status
pages and this changelog.
Thursday, 1.
April 2004
-The (web) servers
have been up continously now for over 15 days. (Those servers are
independent of the image servers).
-The "Animations"
page has been translated to German.
-Two Major websites
may be going to review "Our Planet Earth From Space" within
one or two months.
Monday, 22.
March 2004
The picture archive
on this site is here on the request of a Belgium astronomer, (whose
email address I lost). Now I discover that the picture archive has
become too popular for its own good (too many downloads block the
http page server). It's become necessary to protect the archive
with a password. If you really need access to the Archive please
ask me for a password.
Wednesday, 10.
March 2004
-20:00pm GMT The problem with the missing name server has been resolved.
-17:30pm GMT : Well, I return home today to discover that I don't
have wallpaper anymore, and the image server in California is unreachable.
The reason is that the nameserver for the domain opefs.com is
down. I shot off two emails: one to the domain registrar, and one
to my webhost in USA, asking for a quick remedy. There is sadly
nothing more I can do now but wait for this issue to be fixed. The
reason that you still can read these pages is because the webpages
are served from my office location in Germany.
Saturday, 6.March
2004
-the website was offline today from 11:29 GMT until 12:41GMT, because
an errant program tried to change the connection parameters. I was
not at home, so I could not catch this error sooner.
Sunday, 29.Feb.
2004
-The translation
of the German wallpaper pages is complete.
-Since I had a few enquiries about people wishing to buy more than
one screensaver at a time, I've added a shopping cart system to
the screensaver pages.
Thursday, 26.Feb.
2004
-Because I blocked the IP of my friend below I accidentally blocked
my own webserver from updating (for one hour). That's now been fixed.
Sorry.
-Dear mostly unknown user at 193.128.107.227
(I believe the IP belongs to Roche Pharmaceuticals, UK):
I've banned your IP address now from all my servers. If you somehow
manage to read these pages, then you should know that I would like
to know why you kept downloading every image on my server every
3 minutes. My images are only updated once every 20 minutes (I make
this very clear). You have used up approx. 600MB every day, which
is almost twice as much as a normal user could be using up in two
months (being connected 24/7). If you would like to pay for the
bandwidth you actually use, please send a cheque of $150 US Dollar
to my address (this will cover your bandwidth for one year), then
I will unban your IP (and give you the http address of my image
server).
My userbase of over 1000 people will thank me for banning you from
my webserver,
because their browsing is going to be more responsive.
Monday, 23.
Feb.2004
-Well, today I finished re-linking the main images to the new image
server. Whilst I did this I noticed a particular user with IP address
193.128.107.227 who could not resist downloading all 10 image views
on this website with a leeching program. Normally I don't mind too
much about this, because people that do this kind of stuff are in
the minority.
But what really annoyed me was that the user 193.128.107.227 downloaded
all 10 images every 4 minutes. That really is not necessary. Please
leech only once every 20 Minutes in future.
Friday, 20.Feb.2004
- The website was offline today from 16:06 - 16:33h GMT to run Checkdisk
on my system disk. It surprised me how long this took, but it was
necessary to remove a bad sector from the Internet Server. The excessive
paging operations were due to this bad sector, and not because of
insufficient RAM.
- I will add a page linking to forums which discuss the weather
and are concerned with earthwatching. I thought of doing this myself
(starting such a forum), but why should I reinvent the wheel? There
are a number of forums known to me which have linked to my site
in the past, and I will approach them over the next few days. It
would be nice to have reciprocal links of course, but
I'll eat the cookie as it crumbles.
-I think I need to buy more RAM in my Internet Server. My 512mb
do get used up, when the server runs 8 days non-stop, and the paging
is very noisy. The Image Processing Server has 328mb, but that is
sufficient.
-All right, I'm
now fairly happy with the new hosting service.
There are only a minimal and reasonable amount of drop-outs (see
the Server Status
for details),
but the downloads are of course much better for you now.
The bandwidth load on my homeserver (Image
Processing Server) has
dropped by about 75%-80%, because I've shifted most of the image
downloading to the commercial webhost. If you are interested, the
name of my new web host is http://radish.net.
The Image Processing and the serving of the webpages is still done
at home (which I really should call my office), whereas most of
the Image serving is now done from California. Interesting idea,
if I may say so myself...
-The
overall server up-time for the Image Processing Server of http://ourplanet.ath.cx/satellite
(including all maintenance outages) is 99.6%, since 29.Dec.2003.
Monday,16.Feb.2004
I'm
giving the new hosting service a try. I don't know how reliable
the connection will be, but there is only one way to find out for
sure...
Please send me an email,
if you have any problems (does not affect paying customers, who
are on a different server).
Saturday, 14.Feb.2004
-I
need 5mb of webspace which is available via FTP 24 hours a day. I
will FTP about 1.5mb of data every 20 minutes. For access to those
data from the Internet I would like to pay
$1 US Dollar each Gigabyte. The data volume will start at approx.
20 GB each month, increasing soon to 40 GB and then over 100+. The
webspace just needs a fixed IP, but it does not need Perl, PHP, ASP,
CGI, email, logs, or any other bits.
If you (or your department) can offer a reliable (and expandable)
hosting service please contact me. Click
to email me with offers.
The hosting service I tried between 10-14th February
didn't provide uninterrupted 24h FTP access, which made their service
useless for the purpose of this website.
Wednesday,
11.Feb.2004
-Server downtime from 16:25 to 16:30h GMT, thanks to a Microsoft patch.
-Maybe my new webhosts are very busy applying the new Microsoft patches,
because they haven't had the time yet to activate the new webserver
for "Our Planet Earth From Space".
Tuesday,
10.Feb.2004
-Thank you to all my supporters and customers:
The "Ourplanet" website has now generated enough revenue
to purchase a proper domain name and serverspace with a large data
transfer volume. You should see a drastic improvement in download
speeds soon. The last week my available webserver at home was pushing
its limits, with a daily transfer rate of up to 750MB. My ADSL connection
is able to handle a continous 1350MB daily, but it was beginning to
push the limits anyways, during the peak times.
Sunday,
8.Feb.2004
-Screensavers are now sold for $7.99 Dollar US, as a special offer.
-I have included the "Satellite Look-Up tool" in the free
versions of the "View From The ISS" and the "Just Flying
Around" screensavers. When you query the catalogue of the National
Space Science Data Centre, please be as precise as possible when typing
in the spacecraft/satellite name. Else, you'll notice, its going to
take a long time before you get an answer from the Master catalogue.
Saturday,
7.Feb.2004
-Finished the translation of the "Contact" page in German.
-The "Credits" page in German is complete.
-Today
there was a 10 minute server outage due server maintenance from 12:40
- 12:50 GMT. The overall server up-time for http://ourplanet.ath.cx/satellite
(including all maintenance outages) is 99.5%, since 29.Dec.2003.
Thursday,
5.Feb.2004
-I noticed that a large percentage of users never finished downloading
the screensavers. I took this to mean that the downloads from my homeserver
were too slow. Therefore I've now put the screensaver downloads on
the fast server of my ISP.
Then I noticed that Microsoft Internet Explorer seems to have changed
the default download behaviour (or maybe it has something to do with
my server-configuration). Therefore I've included the hint to right-click
with the mouse and "Save Target As..." which lets users
download without problems. It can't be right that 80% of all users
never completed the downloads, and this should improve the success
rate.
Sunday,
1.Feb.2004
-Fixed the picture archive function. After a week the directory of
the day is now deleted, to make room for the new images.
-Fixed the link continuity in the German section. But tonight the
"Men in Black" are on TV, so I won't do any more translating.
-simplified the webpages with the 1024x768 images
-I've dropped the price for the wallpaper subscription to $9.99 Dollar
US.
-Today there was a 6 minute server outage due to necessary disk-maintenance
from 11:54 - 12:00 GMT. The overall server up-time for http://ourplanet.ath.cx/satellite
(including all maintenance outages) is 99.4%, since 29.Dec.2003.
That isn't too bad, I think, considering that most commercial hosting
services only guarantee a maximum uptime of 99.5% (EXCLUDING, however,
all server maintenance, HD-failure, network failure, acts of God,
or basically anything which could spoil their pretty statistics).
Saturday,
31.Jan.2004
-Satellite data are now all updated every 2 hours (instead of at 2,
3 and 6 hours intervals).
-The "View from the International Spacestation" webpage:
by clicking on the Space Station you are now taken to the homepage
of the ISS. In the screensaver and the wallpaper there is now a link
to the "ISS Homepage" in the lower right hand corner. Some
links on the ISS homepage will open in a new window, which means that
you need to exit the screensaver to see them. In the screensaver please
avoid clicking on Quicktime movie links. The screensaver can't handle
playing them, and may crash.
Friday,
30.Jan.2004
-corrected a couple of errors in the "Earth From Mars" view:
1. the cloud picture now does update every 3 hours (it didn't before)
2. thanks to a tip from Hari Nair I removed the sun glare, which made
the background appear gray, instead of black.
3. not an "error" as such, but a tip: included in the "Earth
From Mars View" is a marker with the brightest background stars.
That there aren't any stars visible is likely due to the fact that
the field of view is only 7.1 arc minutes, and there likely aren't
any bright stars behind Earth from this perspective (?).
Monday, 26.Jan.2004: 15:30 GMT
-It seems that a editing error prevented the wallpaper from updating
properly since 0:00 GMT. I've restored the original wallpaper files
from back-up, and the problem is now fixed. I didn't get time to do
this earlier, as I was in the office.
Sunday,
25. Jan. 2004
-the
view of Earth from Mars has been added.
It is also included in the archive.
-"Earth From Mars" is now available both as screensaver
and desktop wallpaper.
-It's now possible to get rid of the annoying wallpaper ads by buying
the wallpaper for $4.99 US Dollar
-The German translations of the homepage and "Explanation"
page are ready.
-I really want to make the "Satellite-Look Up Tool" available
in the free Screensaver versions of "View From ISS" and
"Just Flying Around", but the NASA Satellite database seems
to have a problem. It's now taking over 2 minutes to connect, at which
point it becomes pointless to include this "feature".
Monday,
19.Jan. 2004
-After a request I've added an archive of one week's pictures, which
are accessible online.
-The
first translation is progressing. The German flag link is active.
Saturday, 17.Jan. 2004
-It
took 18 hours to do a complete "restore from backup", which
was necessary to revert one of my 120Gb "dynamic" disks
in Win2K back to a "basic" disk. I had problems with that
dynamic disk right from the start, and converting it now to basic
seems to have solved the sporadic write-errors. Since the 120Gb disk
is only a double-redundant archive disk (!) the errors didn't affect
normal computing operations anyways. The write errors did however
prevent doing a complete backup of the Internet server. Should now
the boot-disk ever fail (of either the Internet server or the "Image
Processing Machine"), it ought to take only minutes to restore
the Internet service.
Friday,
16.Jan. 2004
Servers were offline for 4 minutes at 4.40am GMT for a software upgrade
(disk-cloning).
Tuesday,
13.Jan. 2004
-I'll have to start translating the website into German.
Saturday,
10.Jan.2004
-A new view is added: Australia and Oceania. The Planet is rendered
as realistically as possible.
-New wallpapers and the new code for them is ready. Wallpaper now
uses the Windows download manager for synchronizing every 20 minutes.
This should solve the problems some people had with just seeing a
white wallpaper, after a reboot. The feature is sponsored through
advertising.
Wednesday,
7.Jan.2004
-I've
been pottering about with the XML code for the desktop items (which
is a pain), to find a way to refresh the images without using Javascript.
The Javascript refreshes used at the moment are not very good, because
if a user turns the computer off and on again (as some people do),
then the first thing the desktop (wallpaper) will try to do, is to
reload the wallpaper page. As the first thing that happens when a
computer boots up is not to go online instantly, this means that the
desktop item page containing the wallpaper a:) erases itself, leading
to a white wallpaper background, or b:) cause the wallpaper to become
permanently cached in offline mode. The result is in any case that
the wallpaper no longer updates, until the desktop item is deleted,
and re-installed. The code for the desktop items (cdf) allows a much
more reliable solution, which I got working. I just need to frame
the wallpaper differently in the new page, to keep it looking as good
as it does now (without scrollbars and other unwanted features, like
white borders, etc)...
Tuesday, 6.
Jan.2004
-simplified the
layout of the site a bit
-made a self-refreshing page for all current views (including ads)
-submitted a few screensavers to a couple of shareware sites
-fixed a couple of inconsequential bugs in the screensavers
-listed the site in the Open Directory project
- Sunday, 4.Jan.2004
-final testing of the new flying advert screensaver code...
-updated the "Customized" page with the new subscription
rate
-finalized the "Explanation" page.
-the Purchasing Screensaver page is completed
-programming for the flying advert is tested and ready to implement
-the satellite look-up tool has the go-ahead
-I
will move to a subscription model for the ad-free screensaver and
desktop items.
The price will be $0.99 cent per month (or somesuch).
The subscription pay products will be personal on a "per seat"
basis and are absolutely nontransferable. Each screensaver, even the
free ones, have a fixed bandwidth cost to me. In a worst case scenario
where the computer runs 24/7 the bandwidth per user is a maximum of
330MB per screensaver per month and the same again for the wallpaper.
If you know that the cheapest commercial provider of bandwidth charges
$2 Dollar US per 1000MB, then try and figure out my profit.
I've done a few calculations and looked at the download logs, and
find that I can't offer both the screensaver AND the desktop item
for the same inclusive price. What I mean is that wallpaper and screensaver
are separate items. If one wants both a screensaver and desktop item,
the subscription price is going to be $0.99 cent US x 2 = $1.98 Dollar
US.
Unfortunately the purely ad-sponsored pay model has not panned out.
-the Changelog is converted from .txt format to .html,
so that the topics listed here can be indexed by search engines.
-increased number of simultaneous server connections from 20 to 1000
This should prevent "connection refused" errors, and provide
space for a larger user base.
Saturday, 3.Jan.2004
-the online shop for the screensavers is open
-added the free screensavers to the filesharing networks Kazaa (Fasttrack),
Overnet, Edonkey 2000 and Kademlia. Search for "planetearth".
-all screensavers of the 8 views are now available.
-Changed the layout of the home page to find what you want quicker.
-developed a "Satellite Lookup Tool" for the screensaver.
-awaiting answer from NSSDC for go-ahead on satellite lookup tool.
-finished the page with explanations of the images and symbols etc.
Friday, 2.Jan.2004
-increased the cloud luminance, as before the 3D Crescent views
appeared a bit washed out. Now the images sparkle again.
-trivial as it may sound, I changed the white areas of the favicon to
be transparent. This
has the effect of suddenly replacing the standard "e" in the
URL field in Internet Explorer
with the globe icon. Hurray!
-added finally the free "Europe & Middle East" screensaver
-For both the "North America" views: changed from km/h to
mp/h for the hurricane warnings
-Corrected the North American visible satellite views, to be centered
on Denver, Co.
(visible satellites are dependent upon the location, Europe has different
data).
-Added a Pacific time marker for San Francisco
-Made all the North America city markers the same colors and added Washington
DC. and Toronto
-Created the "View From ISS" screensaver.Thursday, 1. Jan.2004
-changed the ocean color of the "Whole Earth" and "24
Hour Animation" to a lighter shade.
I think it was just a little bit too dark.
-updating the "Explanations" page.
-The clouds will now appear less pixelated. This is due to my
resampling the original cloud file from 2048x1024 pixels to 4096x2048
pixels. The result looks smoother.
-removed the elevation map from the static Europe and America
crescent views. Elevation maps show Mountains in 3d effect, but since
they are only visible on the Earth horizon, there wasn't any noticeable
effect,
except to generate some needle-like artifacts,
which were not useful.
-I noticed that in the "American Crescent"some satellites
were shown
by name twice. That was due to a batchfile error for the military
satellites. Problem fixed.
-fixed error in double display of satellites in "View From ISS",
was same error as in "American Crescent"
-Happy New Year: The German DynDNS service sent me the status report
of the server outage on Monday for the URL http://www.ehabich.ipme.de/satellite/.
Its all been solved now and works again. Unfortunately I lost over 300
daily visitors to my site from Britain.Wednesday, 31.Dec.2003
-the ADSL connection got killed for 30 minutes at 22 GMT. Its just
lucky that I'm not doing anything else this New Years eve.
-Website server was off-line for about 1 hour, due to "maintenance".
My server has become a very popular target for hackers and I had to
increase Firewall security. :(
-Please donate to this website. I need to buy reliable commercial server
space, more bandwidth & a proper domain name for this website. I
would be very happy if you could contribute towards this by making a
small donation to this website. You can of course donate any amount,
but in return for your minimum donation of $5 I can offer
you an advertisement
-free version of the "Our Planet Earth From Space" screensaver
of your choice. You need to tell me if you want a free screensaver,
and for which view, in the PayPal "Comments" field. The normal
retail price for this screensaver will be $14.99. -putting the first
version of the North America screensaver online.
-added a rather elaborate "Contact" page with a webcam
-added a copyright notice on the images
-added a Favorites Icon for the websiteMonday, 29.Dec.2003
-to make the "Just Flying Around" view a bit more interesting
("edutaining"), I've added
lots of little known geographical marker points: mostly Antarctic Research
Stations
and Island Nations.
-Well, this site was just off-line 6 hours, thanks to a technical glitch
with my free DynDSN
provider. That's not the type of reliability I'd like to offer. Purchasing
webspace
from a commercial host appears the only way to make the site more reliable.
-if I want to expand the site and provide a more reliable download I
will need to purchase
bandwidth from commercial webhosts.
-added 3 more views, one being a tracking view of the International
Space Station, and two
are "crescent" views of Europe and N.America, for a more dynamic
visualization.
-Active volcanoes are updated now weekly on wednesday around Midnight,
since the Global
Volcanism Program doesn't update more oftenSunday, 28.Dec.2003
-credits page is brought up to date
-changed all the basic image-maps to NASA's "Blue Marble"
images.
-The "Whole Earth" & "Whole Earth Animation"
views have been changed to exclude sea-ice (makes
it easier to observe cloud formation).
-the Quake recording has been changed to display any quake stronger
than 6.4 for 30 days
after the event.
-I discovered a new way of representing the Planet more realistically,
which is shown in the
"Just Flying Around" view. This view differs from the classical
satellite view shown in most
weather reports. The classical view is of an observer hovering over
the earth, looking
straight down on the Planet. Can be nice, but its one dimensional. I'll
need to make index
pages for each major section of the Globe to prevent cluttering the
homepage with a dozen
different views.Saturday, 27.Dec.2003
-the animation page has been updated with a user friendly interface,
which makes it possible
to zoom and set animation speeds.Friday, 26.Dec.
2003
-the images from this website can now easily be installed as self-updating
wallpaper via the
"Desktop Item" option.
-unfortunately my ISP has informed me that the bandwidth limit on my
private homepage of
2 Gigabyte has been exceeded (I didn't even know that there was a limit).
This means I
must serve the webpage from my server at home, until a agreeable self-sustaining
solution
is found. Basically I have to find a way to pay for bandwidth.Monday, 22.Dec.2003
-the first search engine queries fromd Yahoo! are starting to arrive
at
the website. I find this remarkable, since I haven't submitted the site
to any searchengines yet.
-The site registers over 600 genuine visitors daily, after just 8 days.Sunday, 21.Dec.2003
-added keywords for search-engine indexing
-start of visual redesign of the web site, I hope it's a hit
-added auto-refresh on all pages, except the experimental animation
page
-added countdown timer in status bar (Browser lower left side)
-I removed the shading from the Whole Earth Animation, because it is
easier to see the shifting
weather patterns in daylight.
-The experimental animation is slowed to half speed, after a suggestion
by Fotako.Saturday, 20. Dec.
2003
-changed the earthquake script, because it sometimes locked up the program.
It is now a Perl script, and not a compiled binary,Friday, 19. Dec.
2003
-included "Creative Commons" licence
-improved download speeds
-corrected "View from the Sun" and added 3D effect (the height
of continents and mountains is exagerrated).Wednesday, 17. Dec.
2003
-changed update interval to 20 minutes
-fixed the animation update sequence. The cloud animation should refresh
itself now every 3 hours
with a current picture. It will take 24hours until the buffer is complete...
-fixed a small problem with updating 4 worldviews simultanously.Tuesday, 16.Dec.
2003
-I can see now that I have to delete the picture buffer, before the
animation updates properly.
That will be something to do for tomorrow, although I'll be going to
the Christmass market,
and may be too drunk with "Gluehwein" to do that ...
-after some thought I reduced the animation frame-rate of the animation
to those frames when the
cloud images are updated (every 3 hours). That way the animation size
is cut by 1/3.
-adding the visible satellites marker again to the "Europe and
Middle East" map.
I noticed that zooming the animation image does not add to the information
which can be extracted
from the image. Its easier to see cloud movements in the "Whole
Earth" animated view.
Monday, 15 Dec. 2003
-added Hi-Res 24 hour animation of the world. I don't know how strong
the server-load becomes,
and whether I may have to reduce the animation size, therefore I call
this an "Experiment".
In theory the serverload should not become too excessive, as the animation
frames should stay
in the browser chache until they are updated (after 24h).
I'll try to find a Javascript which includes a "Stop" button
for the animation, in any case.-deleted a number
of "visible satellites" from the "Europe And Middle East"
view. It was too chaotic in the animation.
-changed update frequency of earthquakes from every 6 hours to once
per hour (at 58 mins past the hour)
-cloud cover is now updated every 3 hours instead of every 6 hours (at
Midnight GMT, 3h, 6h, etc...)
-Satellite Tracking from Norad for the International Spacestation and
Satellites updates 3 hourly
-active volcanoes are now updated daily at 17:58 GMT (instead of Mondays
and Thursdays at 18 GMT)
-added the moonphase display to the "View from our Sun" satellite
view
-added Space Station tracking to "View from our Sun" and "The
World" views
Sunday, 14.Dec.
2003
-Website started.
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