20001114: 3 questions

On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Clint Rowe wrote:

> Chiz,
> 
> I have a few questions that I forgot to ask you last week.
> 
> First, in your Gempak status report, you mention a new gif driver that 
> does not require the X display.  I see in the distribution two new drivers:
> gif and gif2.  Is one (or both) this new driver?  If they both are, what's 
> the difference?

Clint, gif2 is driver that gets built and installed currently.
My binary tarfile for solaris has the old working "gif" also which 
should have a timestamp of August rather than October. Its not
current.

Gif2 is the one I listed down in the new device drivers section in:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/gempak/GEMPAK5.6/whats_new.html

(NCEP will be renaming the gif2 to gif in the next release however just to make
things confusing)


> 
> Second, any chance of getting an SNCNTR (a la SFCNTR)?  It could do just
> one level at a time, for all I care, then it would be just like SFCNTR, 
> except using upperair data.


Should be pretty straight forward now that I've gone through the development
once.

> 
> Last, what's the difference between nmap and nmap2 on the ntl menu.  I can
> see some obvious differences, for example, in how data sources are specified
> but are there athers?  Is there documantation on these differences somewhere?

See the what's new page for an explanation of why there are 2 versions.
My basic tutorial for NMAP2 is covered in the tutorial under the nprogs section
at:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/gempak/tutorial/nmap.html

I still will add more step-by-step examples, for instance, how to create a grid
from hand analyzed contours and interpolate back to surface station locations.
(Just didn't have time before the workshop).


> 
> Clint
> 
> ====================================================================
> Clinton M. Rowe
> Associate Professor 
> Meteorology/Climatology Program                  phone:(402)472-1946
> Department of Geosciences                          fax:(402)472-4917
> University of Nebraska-Lincoln                        address@hidden
> 
> 
> 


Just got the next release from Mary. 2 new decoders for the new avn and mrf
mos products. Adds the ability to send images to the tiff driver as well.

In regards to 24 bit color, that takes too much memory according to the
developers at NCEP (3 times as much....for 24 vs 8 bits) which affects
the number of loop frames etc that the forecasters use. So, the most likely
course will be to search for an 8 bit visual and use that when the default
display is using 24 bits.

Regarding your other email:

>After I changed the permissions for nmap, etc. Mark was able to run nmap and
>get data and images up.  However, while we were sitting there talking, nmap
>suddenly closed and we had this error message.  Any ideas?  We're guessing
>that it tried to do an auto update and something screwed up.
>
>Clint
>
>
>bora% ntl
>Resource File:  /home/nawips/NAWIPS-5.6/resource/Ntop
>graphic, satellite, radar -- 33 95 20
> Invoke ... /home/nawips/NAWIPS-5.6/bin/sol/nmap
>Finished reading tables...
>Resource File:  /home/nawips/NAWIPS-5.6/resource/Nmap
>X Error of failed request:  BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)
>  Major opcode of failed request:  62 (X_CopyArea)
>  Resource id in failed request:  0x5c009bc
>  Serial number of failed request:  1167
>  Current serial number in output stream:  1167


Yes, nmap does try to auto-update images (when you have images loaded, the
second blue button from the left will be toggled for auto-update on/off).
I suspect that the problem was with loading the new image....but since
there are lots of patched nmaplib routines in the 5.6a release I
will apply them before looking at whether this is a recuring problem.

Steve Chiswell
Unidata User Support