A series of large quakes has hit the area near Vanuatu.
Here is a snapshot of the activity tracked on my homepage [ LINK ]. There have been big quakes near there for some time, but this is cluster of very large events:
M 5.0 — Vanuatu
M 6.1 — Vanuatu
M 5.2 — Vanuatu
M 5.7 — Vanuatu
M 5.4 — Vanuatu
M 6.0 — Vanuatu
M 5.1 — Vanuatu
M 5.1 — Vanuatu
M 5.2 — Vanuatu
M 5.5 — Vanuatu
M 5.0 — Vanuatu
M 5.3 — Vanuatu M 7.1 — Vanuatu
M 5.1 — Vanuatu
It would appear that there is a some significant seismic activity in that region. Other areas like New Zealand and the seemingly always active Papua New Guinea are also seeing events.
M 5.0 — Kermadec Islands, New Zealand
M 5.4 — Kermadec Islands, New Zealand
M 5.4 — Kermadec Islands, New Zealand
M 5.2 — Kermadec Islands, New Zealand
M 5.5 — New Britain region, Papua New Guinea
M 5.0 — New Ireland region, Papua New Guinea
M 5.4 — New Britain region, Papua New Guinea
M 5.1 — New Britain region, Papua New Guinea
M 5.3 — Papua, Indonesia
The largest of the recent events [ LINK ] happened Thursday, February 02, 2012 at 13:34:40 UTC.
As illustrated in this clipping from the USGS Map for the event, there has been a lot of large quake activity in the last 7 days.
Fortunately, despite the area having structures vulnerable to shaking damage, the estimated threat to population due to distance is virtually nil [ LINK ]. It’s estimated less that there was a 30% chance of any fatality, and a 4% chance of more than 30.
Epicenter for the quakes appears to be on a submarine ridge between two island chains. A very nice nursery for a tsunami, should there be significant under sea land movement from a large event.
As always, I continue to watch worldwide seismic events on my home page: [ LINK ].
UPDATE: – 4-FEB-2012 21:20
More activity near the epicenter of that large quake of Vanuatu… these in just the last few hours:
Just before 8:00AM, while reading, I got that sinking feeling. “Hm.. crap.. that’s an earth quake!”. It was mild, sort of like the little warning you’d get when a big-un is about to unleash some havoc. Then.. quiescence. But, you know a quake when you feel one. It’s nothing like a bus or truck driving by.
At any rate… about an hour later a friend of mine shot me a link from the Seattle Times, so I went and checked the USGS site again (my first check was only for my local area.. it was so small I figured it was local). Turns out it was far away, far south of Olympia.
Magnitude 3.9 - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 15:51:08 UTC
At least my PTSD did not kick in this time, although, I did start to get a little anxious. Geez. PTSD sucks… really.. I can’t image how bad it can get for our troops..
I’m a fairly avid reader, seldom without at least one book to read. In fact I have two I’m working through right now. And by working through, I mean, working. Both of these A Beautiful Math and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information are pretty technical in nature, so they are not a typical casual evening read.
Digressing, while fighting off a nasty cold, I took in a little television time on Saturday, the 9th Anniversary of that terrible day in New York City. Obviously there was little on the national broadcast crap-fest, nor the typical brain-dead cable fare to tide me over. But, I flipped onto CSPAN (a guilty pleasure, I’ll admit) and caught most of the 3 hour panel hosted by Lynn Spencer, a commercial airline pilot, whom wrote the book Touching History, The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11.
I was a fascinating panel discussion. The first panel was comprised of FAA and ATC personnel that were on the front line that morning, trying to sort out disaster, land nearly 5000 planes, and re-route the remaining International flights to other countries. The second panel was comprised of commercial pilots flying when the attack happened, and Air Force pilots that had to intercept countless commercial jets, with orders to shoot if they did not comply.
Stories of a airport in Canada that was stacked 30 planes deep, fighter squadrons recalled from a training mission to be re-armed and then briefed on the rules of engagement for shooting down passenger aircraft, pilots that saw the planes hit the buildings while they were trying to land, others simple told to ‘get out of the area, just leave’.
It was a moving 3 hours of television. I felt compelled to go find this book, but sadly, our local book store (I’m not even sure why I waste my time at Barnes and Noble) did not carry it. I know I can get it online, but I’d like to spend my money local, and support stores that carry books such as this.
When I do get the book in my hands, I will be sure to read, and post my thoughts. In the mean time, you might look into it as well. If the book is anything like the articulate author I watched on TV, I’m pretty confident that I will not be disappointed.
UPDATE: 23-SEP-2010
Try as I might, absolutely no luck in finding the book in a brick-and-mortar store. Too many ‘Vampire Stories’ filling the shelves. A rather sad commentary on America’s literary tastes. Not all is lost, the book is in transit as I speak from an online e-tailer. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll be sure to blog when I’ve started to read.
Looks like it will be here sooner than estimated!
Lynn Spencer "Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11"
Previous estimated arrival date: October 07 2010 - October 15 2010
New estimated arrival date: September 29 2010 - October 02 2010
Well, due to events outside of my control, I’ve decided to cut my Stacation short, and take more time off next month. Plans seldom survive first contact with enemy. This one did not.
My 2nd part of the vacation could have proceeded as normal, but I decided the increased cost (up 20% from last year!), lack of big factory demo truck support (only Kymco was going to appear) and what sounded like a very tentative offer by South Sound BMW to offer a few demos, and without my best friend there to share the roads with, the value proposition became inverted. The hundreds of dollars the event would have cost me are better spent elsewhere.
I hope Tom gets his rally sorted out soon. In the past it was THE EVENT of the year in the PNW, big name speakers, factory demo trucks, awesome food and t-shirts included (last year was the first where the t-shirt was an extra $$$$ add-on.). Pfffft. Plus the fair grounds re-did a bunch of the shower/camping facilities to make them a little *less* accessible to us.
Oh well. I’ll put together my own route for August, toss some camping into it and hit the things I want to hit. Mary Hills Loop Road. Been there, done that, and frankly, it’s not all THAT awesome to me. Others find it heavenly. To each our own.
Oh, and I won’t miss the every hour freight trains that keep the campers awake all night if you don’t sleep with ear plugs. :/
Some days are just not meant to be. That’s the conclusion I had at noon today.
The day started out innocent enough. The 4:30 AM sun woke me up, I only managed to make it to 6:00AM before I was ‘awake’.
Work day started at 6:30AM. At this point things were pretty good. No overnight issues (there really area, I have a great IT team working for me!), fired up my data modeling software and continued laying out some concepts for our IT off-site next week. It should be good and productive.
Weather was warm, a little gusty, but so warm, I just had to go fly the helicopter. Fresh from a makeover, and confident after 2 full flying sessions with no issues and crashes, I set out for the Sheridan Airpark at 10:00AM.
With the opportunity to practice some flying with perpendicular and quartering side winds, I set to flying (sadly the on board video camera was accidentally set to audio only.. on well).
The flying was going very well. Had full control, heli was still climbing and settling at odd frequencies.. maybe the motor was OK, ESC was OK, it’s just got this tendency to drop from time to time. Better throttle management required by me.
After doing some fast forward runs, then backing up, and running again, my confidence was building. Had a few gusts push the bird around a bit but I was having a blast. Then.. I got cocky.
Pulling pitch hard a couple of times, it was accelerating up nicely. Up down.. fast. I was starting to really fly it around, then I got behind the curve and started to get close to a fence than I wanted. Cutting back the throttle, also reduced pitch, and the bird started to roll left. Applied hard right cyclic, pulled out some more pitch and tried to flare for a landing when, it happened. Tail Strike. Drove the tail into the ground, stalling the tail rotor. This immediately whipped the heli around hard into a ball in the grass. I thought for certain by the sound, I’d shunted the main blades.
Must to my surprise, and happiness they were completely in tact! So was the very frigile, but very critical flybar. “Sweet.”, I thought, “Flip it upright and fly again. Hm.. uh.. wow.. that looks funny… OH NO!”.
Of all the spare parts I have, a tail boom is not one of them. Now, mine looked like this:That tail boom doesn't look right.. I had blocked out and hour from work to fly, the sun was shining, I was ahead of my personal work schedule, but.. I’d also personally put my bird out of commission for an undetermined amount of time.
Suddenly this pretty darn good day is looking less rosy. Ugh.. I just wanted a little fun flying time and my exuberance got the best of me, and the helicopter. Having been to my local hobby shop SO MANY times in the last month, I knew they did not carry the TRex 450 tail booms in stock. I’d had the forethought to order a spare boom with some other parts direct from a plant in China. But that shipment is 2-3 weeks out!! No way am I going to be happy not flying for 2 or more weeks. 🙁
Back to work, I’d got take care of that and another errand at lunch time. This damage has to wait. Bent boom, broken bracket, twisted boom support.
Around 12:30PM I took lunch. One of the errands I wanted to dispatch today was to sell off my HK-45 Tactical pistol. It was stolen when I left California in 2000. Recovered from a drug dealer in Sacramento a couple of years later. It was found under the front seat of his car when they searched it. There it sat in evidence for another 3 years during his trial. Once it was done, the Sheriff’s department shipped it to the S.O. here in Kitsap (Washington) were I went to pick it up. It’s been mostly untouched since that time. I’ve always had a bad feeling that it was involved in some very unsavory/evil activity. I’ve never shot it. It’s been stored for years. Taking up valuable space in the safe, collecting dust, and as it turns out, rust too. 🙁
So, today I decided to sell it, and took it to a firearms dealer I’ve worked with before to see what they would offer. When I got there, the ‘head guy’ was out. A couple of his workers, enthusiastic, but not knowledgeable about the H&K made an offer that was just way too low. They did suggest I come back later, as the ‘head guy’ might be personally interested in the H&K. Now double disheartened, headed home to complete my work day, looking out the windows at the great day slowly passing by me.
Around 4:30PM, I’d put in a solid day of work, and I needed to go do *something* positive to cheer me up. Weather was so nice, I didn’t care what it would be. So the first order of business was to wash the SUV. I’d washed the car the weekend prior, but the SUV has been dirty since my last trip to CA. Filthy! So.. today it got some TLC and I felt a little better after that.
I’m one of those hope springs eternal type guys, so I packed up the gun again, went to the shop to see if the head-honcho was there, and in fact he was. After some examination he made me an offer 50% higher than his employees did, and I took the deal. It was more than I’d actually expected, so I was happy with that. Suddenly the day was starting to look a heck of a lot better!
A pile of cash in hand, I thought I’d now try my luck at the hobby shop. Worst case, I enjoy a nice drive around the water and back. As it turns out, they do not have the Trex 450 tail boom I needed. No matter, I know that I can drive the 70 miles to Olympia to a big helicopter parts shop and get anything I need.
It was at this point the day improve a bit more. I noticed that another brand of helicopter (EFlight Blade 400) had a nearly identical tail boom for their Blade 400. A smaller helicopter, but.. the boom looked so close, I might be able to use it. And after some measuring, it turns out the diameter is identical, the it’s not only long enough, but TOO long. But that I can fix with a hack saw! Best part, is they sell them in a pack of two for $6.00. 🙂 Ah… I might be flying again today yet! After digging around a little more I found some factory TRex tail boom support parts (also damaged in crash), so I was just about 100% whole, with the exception of a tiny plastic saddle part that the booms attach too. Eventually I found those as well, but only as part of a knight head and tail kit. Parts that I have PLENTY off, and these are white (gag). OH well.. I know how many days it will take to get just the part I want, and drive 70 miles for a part I can get now for $5.00 is just not really practical. So.. I have some more fugly parts for the tail, but I *can* fly! Provided I do the work to replace the parts that is!
High from my great encounter with a Glock specialist at the gun shop, and now the parts I needed for the helicopter, I started the journey home. On the way I looked for a new patio chair. Something to sit out front, read, enjoy a cocktail.. just take in the summer. But I didn’t find exactly what I’m looking for. Close, but I’m going to hold out for the ‘right’ thing. That quest continues.
Without the ‘perfect’ chair to sit outside on, I opted instead to go home, pick up my book about Bob Hoover, and head to the waterfront for a German sausage and a 9lb. Porter. It had cooled to just 90F at this point, so sitting in the shade by the fountain, drinking a great beer, reading a great book and having a great sausage, it REALLY made the rest of the day just about perfect!
Once I finished up, handed the plate and glass back to Amber, I decided to walk further down the boardwalk, find a table and keep reading. And that’s what I did until 10:00PM, when it was starting to get too dark to read.
It really was a MOST enjoyable day in the PNW. If only to have a couple of old friends to have been able to share it with. Well, friends, this is the best I can offer, until next we break bread.
It would be short work to grab the current observations from the local station’s file, then grab the full projected forecast from the Zone’s XML formatted data file (example for Bremerton). I checked the full forecast XML, and unfortunately it does not include the local current conditions. In the grand scheme, this is not a big deal since I’ll need to grab three forecast files already. One more file for current observations is not that much more of a burden.
This section contains the Maximum Forecast Temperatures, covering outlook:
The XML also is kind enough to include the image names. Based on this, the actual visually rendered page is a style sheet applied to the XML data, providing a human readable web page <i>(something I need to get more familiar with)</i>.
Design and coding of the file downloads, processing and construction of the status file is the next step. One thought I have, is to download and store locally, all the images. This will keep my page off of their webserver’s request log. External includes of images can be a burden on a remote server, if you start to abuse it. No sense in being a bad netizen. The question that I need to answer is, <i>CAN I</i> get a list of all the potential images (and there are <i>many</i>) and automate the download to system I plan to run this little product upon.
Automation
Automation of the XML downloading and parsing, will be handled by PERL (at least in this first tool, it may be converted to JAVA on a second iteration, once I’ve performed usability testing of this first iteration).
Additional binary libraries are required first:
apt-get install libxml2-dev
So, here is the skinny. First, have to move into the location where CPAN unravels the packages:
cd /root/.cpan/build
Next, move into the directory for XML::LibXML and manually build with these steps:
cd XML-LibXML-1.70-OucP9U
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install
Next build the XML::Atom package:
cd XML-Atom-0.37-pcVvAG/
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install
Next, a few PERL modules must first be installed. NOTE: the XML::SAX modules are suggested, to provide a big boost in XML parsing performance. You might be surprised at how much processing power the typical XML parsing packages require. XML::SAX and XML::SAX::Expat provide a better code for XML parsing.
NOTE:
As hard as I tried, CPAN would not install XML::LibXML nor XML::Atom. So, I had to get down into the muck and manually build the packages. The trick was getting the libxml2 package talked about earlier.
One critical required step, if you are going to write and use custom PERL libraries, you need to add the following line to a shell initialization file. I’ve been using bash, for lack of any reason to use other shells. Thus, I added this line to my ~/.bash_profile
export PERL5LIB=$HOME/plib
Once that is done, you’ll need to source the updated config file, or logout/login to gain the benefits of the change.
Next is a page that contains the CURRENT and HIGH / LOW temps. In the past I have located some text based data files on the NOAA.GOV website. I’ll have to dig up my notes one this. From time to time NOAA moves those files and changes the format, so those notes might not end up being that helpful. It is somewhere to start.
This page here, has a pile of nice detailed information (see compressed screen shot) but does not contain everything I’m looking for: Recent WX from Bremerton National Airport.
XML DATA!. XML is something I know more about, than I really care too, but it is a portable, easily parsable and text data format. I’ve not yet investigated the contents here, but it does look promising!
What is a “Weather Reader”? Well, it’s like a “News Reader”, but it’s purpose is to check the web for local weather conditions and display them on a computer screen. For this project I’ve revived an old Averatec laptop, installed Ubuntu 9.10 on it and started to write some PERL.
Beat up old Averatec AMD64 laptop, only 1/2 the keyboard works and the battery is shot.
Weather Data
Where to get the weather data? Personally, I like to go to the source. The public source at NOAA.gov. This is a government agency, paid for by my tax dollars (and yours too if you’re a US tax payer.. of which only 53% of working people in the US are, but that’s another story. So, free for the taking as far as I can tell, and am concerned. Which is good, because the real heavy work is up to me. Finding a URL is one thing, using it for something productive is another thing.
To see what I’m looking at as a source without clicking a bunch of links, here is a screen shot of my indented HTML victim:
Seattle Weather from NOAA website.
Now, the only part that I’m interested in is this one:
I’m sure some of you are asking, “WHAT’S THE POINT!?!?!?”. Well, I have several, not all atop my head. As an avid motorcyclist, weather is almost as import to me as mariners and aviators. Weather might look good for the moment, but around here anything can happen. It’s good to know what the forecast is. And not just in one location. Since I transit two area micro-climates commuting to work, knowing that weather will be at the end points of my journey are are a minimum requirement. Plus, I’m lazy. Not so lazy I won’t write a program to do this, but lazy in the larger sense, of I just want to hit a button and see all the data I want, not have to wait for the Weather Chanel to decided it’s ready to dispense it’s forecast, or hunt around on various local news sites. Nor, frankly, have to click on TWO hyperlinks to see what weather will be like HERE and THERE. Nope, I’m just too lazy for that, so I’ll spend 8-32 hours figuring out a way to save myself 2-3 minutes a day (I didn’t say I’m always smart, but always lazy). Remember; “Laziness is the father of invention!”. Digressing….
The Plan
The plan is to use PERL, run every 30 minutes from 5 AM-> 1 AM, and grab the weather page shown above. Parse out only that which I want, and then re-construct my own page on my own server. It’s a basically a mashup page of what I want to see.
Checking the source code of the page, I see that, ugh, NOAA did not supply and useful DIV markers that I can use. So, this will be a rel brute-force process to detect, select, extract and re-construct the page of my dreams. Yes, I can be easily entertained.
Snagging that out of the documents for 2-3 locations will get me what I want. It should look something like this, but the example here does not have any stylesheets applied, it’s a direct rip and mash.
Sample mashup, this was done manually. It at least proved the concept.
There are a couple of problems with that page though, it’s going to take up too much real estate on the final page. Here, it’s almost too large to view on my laptop’s main screen. So, some embedded CSS is in order. This hear overloads the td type, making any text found within anytd rendered at 80% of the normal size. This also overloads creates a style named headish that I is applied to the section titles:
The result of that very small change, gives me a smaller visual footprint, and formatting at little more pleasing to my sensibilities:
A little more hammering around in the stylesheet, and adding a CURRENT and High/Low temps forecast for the day. A little closer to the desired mockup. I still need to locate a suitable news feed to process: A little closer to the desired mashup page.
A series of large quakes has hit the area near Vanuatu.
