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Google Maps is great, you get an extremely nice background map for free. I know that there are alternatives (Bing, OpenLayers, etc) out there but since I’m running Google App Engine it seems easier to go Google all the way. I’m plotting polygons and polylines (that’s what weather is about) and it works great but my input data is kind of sparse so the polygons look very rough. To improve them I’m using b-splines.

The best thing with my job is that I work with the same things that I can spend hours doing in my free time. Too bad you don’t have 40 hours a week free time. It’s been a while but I have finally made som progress. I had some troubles with BigTable (the database that you use in Google App Engine). I put pretty large arrays with weather data in db.

I the world of weather everything is done according to UTC and this causes problems, time zones always does. Yesterday I was debugging an error (not related to weather) in a Spring/GWT/Hibernate app where we are scheduling things. Everything works perfect in the development and test environments but as soon as it is deployed to EC2 it fails. I had a hunch that this was time zone related (EC2 servers on Ireland).

Given the exchange rate for dollars and my never ending need for toys I got a Kindle yesterday. During unboxing I thought that they had glued the instructions onto the screen until I realized that it was the screen. The books I have bought on the iPad earlier synced right in and it remembered which page I was reading. My hope is that it will help me start reading regular books again and I really like the idea that I can buy a book anywhere (where there is 3G coverage) and get it delivered instantly.

I have successfully extracted some temperature data from the grib files, created a basic data model in Google App Engine and a very basic site in Django. I use matplotlib to create isolines that are drawn with Google Maps Api. It’t not that beautiful but there is room for improvement ;)