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News

Data refresh 2023-01-07

The data refresh available from https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html#harmonicsfiles includes routine updates and corrections.  Please note that the SQL dump now includes the database creation commands, and it is no longer necessary or advisable to createdb harmbase2 before loading it.

A corresponding update of the harmonic constants management package is available from https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html#experts.

XTide 2.15.5 (libxtide.so.1.0.4) 2022-05-11

XTide 2.15.5 restored compatibility with recent gpsd.  XTide 2.15.4 fixed a FTB with libXaw 1.0.14 and assorted minor issues.  Get the latest from https://flaterco.com/xtide/files.html and see the changelog for details.

ftp is dead

The archive is at https://flaterco.com/files/xtide/.  Old links pointing to ftp://ftp.flaterco.com/xtide/... should be redirected to https://flaterco.com/files/xtide/....

End of maintenance for non-free data

For various reasons, I have ended maintenance of the non-free data set.  Anyone interested in generating new harmonic constants from published data can find information and a list of data sources here.

Mailing list

There is an announce-only mailing list to which I send notices of each update to XTide or the harmonics data.  You can subscribe or read the archives at https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/xtide-announce.

Please note:  If an announcement to you gets bounced by your mail server, you fall off the list.  Some long-time contributors have fallen off because, unbeknownst to them, their ISPs subscribed to a spam blackholing service that blackholed all pair.com-hosted domains after one of them sent out spam.

To do list

XTide

• Support QGIS integration as a substitute for the builtin location chooser.
• Support m/s as a unit for currents.  NOAA default is now cm/s.
• If libxtide is changed, consider merging some accommodations from XTideMac.
  • Opting out of LibPNG, RGBGraph, Settings, and codeset support.
  • Compiler was opinionated about character encoding and int types.
  • Configure for dirent.h, syslog.h.
• Purge antique portability workarounds.
• Make xttpd use https.
• Support lookup by station ID instead of only name.
• The XML parser should be bundled under the libxtide namespace but isn't.

Major things to do in XTide 3 if life turns out not to be too short after all:

• Support minor axes for currents; yield speed and direction at any time; plot as a cylinder.
• Find a way to put an end to the infinite number of customization settings for graph mode, such as by dumping ALL of the data, metadata, and events to a single-file format that an external graphing app will read.
• Renovate programming practices again (exceptions, checked and const operations, strings).
• On exceptions:  get the application-specific error messages OUT of libxtide.
• Move from Latin-1 to UTF-8 (requires libtcd revision).
• Harmonize the globe location chooser with the way that Google Earth operates.  Use OpenGL of course.
• Support Wayland in non-X11 mode.
• Hydraulic current support is obsolete.

harmbase2

All the cheap and nasty reverse geocoding for the purpose of improving station descriptions is stupid and should be punted to QGIS.

harmgen

It should be possible to link directly with liboctave to avoid the very inefficient conversion of input data from binary to text and back again that currently is done.  However, this would be fixing something that is not broken, and is neither important nor urgent.

libtcd

Purge antique portability workarounds from configure.ac.  Always just include stdint not inttypes.

In signed_bit_unpack, extend_mask << numbits uses undefined behavior.

In the documentation section on inference, cite NOAA SP NOS CO-OPS 3 Sec. 4.2.3 explaining how bogus it is.

Things to do in the next major revision, if there ever is one:

• Purge COMPAT114 code and documentation.
• UTF-8.
• Move station ID to header.
• Add header field to flag tides versus currents.
• Add depth field for currents.
• Support minor axes for currents.
• Get rid of internal state; fix inability to have more than one database open.
• Remove gratuitous complexity in the encoding of speeds, equilibrium arguments, and node factors; make speeds 32-bit unsigned with no offset.
• Possibly permit node factors to be specified for intervals shorter than 1 year and/or support apps that use libcongen to generate the node factors themselves.

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