swas blog

All Twitter accounts that Swas Inc. serves feeds to have now been moved from Twitterfeed to our own servers. Our feeds are now the fastest way to obtain weather observations and warnings through either SMS or through data feeds on phones or computers. We are by no means finished with our efforts to increase the speed of our weather feeds and will continue to update you here as any changes take effect. For the moment, our focus here will shift to assuring that all of our warning and observation pages which are linked to from the feeds are accessible even from the lamest of phone browsers (read: BlackBerry’s own browser) and these changes should start roughly within a week from now.

I would like to mention for anyone that lives near volcanoes or resides within an area prone to earthquakes and Tsunamis that our Seismic_Alerts account has been upgraded to our faster server as well.  In addition, filters have been installed on the volcanic activity feed so that you will now only receive red and orange alerts and will not be bombarded with dozens of green (normal) alerts each day. When a feed comes through now, you really need to pay attention to the details, especially when you see “Potential Tsunami?” at the beginning of the tweet.

We have filtered an earthquake feed and only allow it to publish when the reported earthquake is over 7.4 on the Richter magnitude scale. When you see this prefix, this does not mean you are about to drown in a massive tidal wave, as the earthquake epicenter could be in India and you are reading about it in Los Angeles. However, when you see “Potential Tsunami?” you need to click on the link and go check for the location of the epicenter. If that location is just off the coast from you, you should not only seek further information, you should perhaps utilize a radio as you are walking or driving to higher ground. In the past few months, this feed has successfully warned well in advance of 2 major Tsunamis and is perhaps the fastest way to currently warn you of an impending Tsunami.

One final word on Twitterfeed and Mario Menti as well as our migration off his servers. Twitterfeed serves almost 700,000 feeds daily to Twitter, which is a truly amazing feat. Primarily because of that massive scale, Twitterfeed was unable to fetch weather feeds from the National Weather service in less than a thirty-minute cycle. Mario did not build a weather feeds server; he built a feed server for thousands of people, and each of them serving different types of content.

We are not only thrilled to have been able to work with Mario and Twitterfeed; we would not exist in our current form without the help of both. Mario has offered us numerous tips and suggestions, some of which we have employed and are still utilizing. I have thanked Mario personally, but wanted to thank him publicly so here goes:

Mario, only gratitude remains, and thank you so very much for providing us with a wonderful nursery to build and develop the idea that we are now finally starting to fully realize.  Simply put, Swas Inc. would not be here if Mario Menti and Twitterfeed had never existed.

Thanks so very much for everything and good luck with that galactic-sized feed server,

Gisher

I have personally witnessed some of the most bizarre behavior I have ever seen from the entire Twitter system. Starting a few days ago I noticed several small quirks such as missed feeds and in some cases, duplicate Twins that we know quite well were not sent from our servers. I have seen it coming from the remaining accounts we still have running from Twitterfeed, so it isn’t just Swas Inc, that is having a thrill ride.

You could say that it made sense to me when Twitter announced it was shutting down tonight at 11:00pm for two hours, as frankly, it was looking like Twitter had installed way too much junk, and entirely too fast in recent weeks and Twitter’s server obviously needed a High Colonic.

Then this afternoon, Twitter turned into Hal from 2001 and started generating results that were as random as they were disturbing. Then I noticed Tech Crunch was having the same experience as I was so I put my medication back in the cabinet. It would be entertaining to some degree, especially the serendipity component, if it were not for the fact that we are serving weather feeds.

Hopefully Twitter will return, refreshed and restored when you wake up in the morning.

Sweat dreams.

—gisher

We are roughly about half way through moving feeds over to our new server and anticipate that we will complete the migration within the next 2 weeks. The timing is excellent, as we should be able to start rolling out our new observation and warning pages at that time. These new pages, which are linked to in every tweet on every Twitter account we maintain, should make it easier for most cell phone browsers to easily view and utilize each page.

Regarding the speed of tweet delivery we are obtaining from our new server, these speeds vary by account. We have allocated the fastest fetch times to entire state feeds and cities with the largest populations first. If you are following Swas Inc. on either a state feed, or from one of the larger cities we serve, your feeds should be delivered to you in an average of seconds.

We will be adding some smaller towns that will have fetch times that can approach an average of 2 minutes and thirty seconds for delivery, which is still faster than most other Internet weather providers can offer you, but not nearly as fast as one of our state feeds.

We are planning to move more cities from these slower fetch times to much faster times during the coming months, but this will not occur overnight. This delay is partly occurring because we have received word that the National Weather Service is looking to offer feeds through PubSubHub sometime early next year, and we need to focus on assuring we are fully integrated with NWS when they complete the conversion to PubSubHub. If NWS experiences any delays in rolling out PubSubHub, we will migrate many of our slower feeds to fetch times that more closely match what our larger accounts and state feeds provide now.

Many of you who have been switched over to our new server may have noticed you seem to be receiving more warnings now, and your perception is correct. Twitterfeed has capped their feeds per fetch cycle to 5 and our new server will fetch an unlimited number of warning feeds and distribute them to you. This is a good thing.

Last but not least, we have recently added several Ski Resorts to our offerings. We are (as always) utilizing the closest observation feeds we can obtain from NWS. On occasion, while the observation station will be located fairly close to the resort, it may not be located at the same elevation as the Ski resort. Most reasonably intelligent people will realize that temperature readings from higher elevations will be many degrees colder than temperatures from lower altitudes, and not assume otherwise. If any resorts that we offer feeds for actually take their own readings during the peak seasons and would like to provide us with an XML feed, we will gladly add the feed to the stream and provide you credit as well as a link.

If any resorts just wish to complain about the altitude of any NOAA station we fetch from, please take a number and wait in that long line over there to your immediate left:)

–gisher

If you have visited either our warning or observation pages within the last twenty-four hours you may have noticed 2 new ad placements. One is for NASA’s Space Place and the other is directing you to SciJinks, another NOAA project.

The Space Place is a great place for kids to learn about some of NASA’s most exciting missions to study galaxies, stars, black holes, planets, asteroids, comets, moons, and our own beautiful Earth. Interactive games, animated cartoons, and hands-on projects, and fun facts entice elementary school-aged children, their teachers, and their parents to find out more about space and Earth, science and technology. A Spanish version of most of the site is also available. They have created a Twitter Page with a daily fact of the day. You can follow them on Twitter here , and their MySpace page is here.

SciJinks transports visitors to the wild world of weather to learn about predicting global weather patterns, but SciJinks has many other offerings:

Weather Fun: Take the Weather Challenge, watch the GOES Movieplex, run the Bad Weather Joke Machine. These and other highly interactive activities are provided to guests in Weather Fun to challenge their “Weather IQ” and learn exciting facts about Earth’s environment and atmosphere.

Weather & People: How does weather affect you? Do you know how to be prepared for destructive events caused by weather? What is weather folklore? In Weather & People, visitors can learn how to prepare themselves and their families for weather related emergencies. Also, learn how people from various parts of the world interpreted weather phenomena in the World of Weather Folklore.

Weather Projects: What is science anyway? What is the process usually described as “scientific method”? How do I go about doing a science fair project? These and other interesting questions provide a forum for young scientists to learn about the scientific process. Weather Projects also provides several exciting examples of possible weather-related projects aspiring meteorologists could consider for their next science assignment.

Weather Technology: Have you wondered how weather satellites monitor a specific location on earth? Or how other satellites are used to map earth’s surface on a regular basis? In Weather Technology, visitors can learn the difference between GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) and POES (Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites) and how NOAA/NASA utilize the satellites to predict changes in the Earth’s environment, and conserve and manage the nation’s coastal and marine resources.

Teachers especially appreciate the section on the site for educators, which has lots of suggestions for how to use the resources of this Web site in the classroom.  More on that program is available here.

You can find SciJinks Facebook page here, And their Twitter page located here.

We ask that you visit these sites whenever you have a spare moment. They are both truly fun sites for kids of all ages, and sneak in plenty of what we refer to as “Stealth Education”. We are more than happy to run these ads as I am sure most of our followers are well aware we receive our raw feeds from NOAA’’s own National Weather service. Special thanks to Brian Ives, for supplying us with all of the details on both of these fine projects. You can contact Brian at brives@jpl.nasa.gov for more information on either program.