WeatherFax ...

[HUR450502]

Dear Rick,

first of all: You shouldn't work on Sundays ..... think of your family.... However, I most appreciate your dedication.
As to your results, I am afraid, this is what I thought....

As said earlier, I believe, I have gone through this process of calibration several times and it always worked without distorting the track.

Also, as said earlier, I believe this startetd after I tried to calibrate a satellite image (some conical image I guess) and I didn't succeed and came up with some funny results and I believe after this the whole distorted track stuff started.

Today I bought some registry cleaner on the internet, it reported several thousand errors in the registry, in the program files, in the browser and - whatever. So, I did all the corrections (the computer still survived....) and tried installing OpenCPN again - and what should I say 1. when going to the weatherfax plugin files menu - it STILL remembered the place of the TIFF file. 2. When importing the track, it STILL remembered the location of the .GPX file (completely different directory). .....

And - needless to say - I still have the distorted tracks after calibration....

As mentioned earlier, I believe OpenCPN (or any windows service it uses) seems to keep some memory of what has happended during the earlier life of the program and this leads to the continued error.

However, if you or Sean do not have any clue, where this is coming from, before we are waisting time, we leave it at that. my plans anyway are, to move to the 64 bit version of Windows 7 and - at least then - any "memory" should be erased. Parallel I will - before changing the system - manually erase any key from the registry, which has any pointer to OpenCPN and then retry the whole stuff. OK??

As to all of your screenshots, I do not see any difference to what I did. So, there must be something in MY system, that was changed some time ago, probably with the calibration of the satellite image,that causes this funny effect as mentioned before. ......

Please - except you have any ideas - stop working on this, I will report what has happened after my actions here and we can then go from there, ok???

Best regards, and many thanks for all your support and work,

Uwe

[CarCode]

It is not the memory nor the Registry even with ugly Windows which can remember something after a new start of an application such as OpenCPN.
It is simply the configuration file opencpn.ini.
Gerhard

[rgleason]

Uwe,

Thank you for your consideration. It is still so very puzzling... I believe Gerhard is right about "remembering" coming from opencpn.ini. It seems that somehow the current navobj.xml down at the level of the subject track is being changed somehow by some gremlin whose source we have not found yet. Furthermore, on your machine it appears to be triggered by running the weatherfax wizard.

Uwe, it appears you are using these coordinates from the User Coords you sent

WeatherFaxCoordinates>
<Coordinate Name="New Coord"

X1="132"
Y1="411"
Lat1="50.00000"
Lon1="-90.00000"

X2="1548"
Y2="1000"
Lat2="20.00000"
Lon2="0.00000"
Mapping="Mercator"
MappingMultiplier="1.0000"
MappingRatio="1.0000" />
</WeatherFaxCoordinates>

This appears to be almost exactly what I used (you can see my selections in one of the screenshots) , so it cannot be the weatherfax wizard settings that start this gremlin.

Will still think about it.

Rick

[HUR450502]

Hi Rick,

yes, the coordinates are the same. Whether or not it is just the .ini file, I do not know. Because - just start OpenCPN, then do the calibration and then import the track and you have the distorted track (200 miles longer than the original track). Then close the program and start it again - now with the .ini file with these "wrong location pointers" - don't worry about anything, just go and import the track again, and it is fine......

So - in my system - something goes wrong, right after the calibration....

As I said, for whatever reason the weatherfax plugin "knows" the location of the TIFF file (C:\F-DISK\Jan-Wellem\Wetter\

and the GPX-Import for the track still knows the GPX file location C:\F-DISK\Jan-Wellem\ARC 2008\ARC 2009\ ----

and I was not able to get rid of these by uninstalling. However, it is easy to change this, by moving these files somewhere else, but I believe, there is still some more "memory" somewhere..... sorry to be such a pain.....

Best regards, Uwe

[rgleason]

Uwe,

I saved the coordinates to a special name "Uwe-Tiff" in the dropdown, then I set the coordinates correctly. Then when I wanted to overlay the file again, I just had to browse to the file weatherfax > open > file > then browse anywhere, select the file and then pick the Uwe-Tiff from the dropdown, it should apply the same coordinates.

Also you can put the Track that you gave me in any directory and browse to it. So both files can be located in directories other than thee typical ones you use. Don't think that will change anything but who knows?
You could try putting the

[HUR450502]

Dear Rick,

possibly I wasn't clear in my previuos comments: For sure (and I have tested this) the location of the files does not change anything. This is not my point, my point is/was, that the location was still in the drop-down menus - even after erasing and re-installing OpenCPN and this leads me to the supposition, that there might be more - something I do not know - that is "remembered" by Windows or whatever, and that this causes the weatherfax plugin to go to some erroneous location and build these "reduced" tracks after this calibration operation. Also it stores some funny locations and zoom factors in the opencpn.ini file.

I have to admit - I have no clue - and also I have to admit, that, having worked for 40 years in THE big IT company of that time in software etc. ..., some time on a real down-to earth technical level, fixing SW problems, I am no novice to this (however, I am no Windows "expert"....).

As you cannot re-create this problem, there must be some problem left on MY system, that was generated earlier during some handling of OpenCPN, that leads to this problem, and most probably, we can only debug it on my system. Whether or not this is worthwhile to spend the time on, I do not know. Currently I am tending to a more "radical" solution, by just changing the system to the 64 bit thing and thereby removing every trace of the problem from the harddrive.....

Before doing this, I will do one other thing, I too run Mac-OS (Yosemite) on my pc (just the other partition) and I will test, what happens there.....

Will report this later today, ok??

Again, thanks a lot, don't waste too much time in this, as I believe it is obviously a problem just on MY computer - the windows part. The only thing that I believe is interesting is, what has lead to this problem, could this be caused on any system - and this might be evaluable through finding out the problem on just my system. OK??

Best regards,

Uwe

[HUR450502]

...... ha, sorry, the plugin is not available for Mac ......

ok, so, no feedback from this "test" .....

Best regards,

Uwe

[rgleason]

Hopefully with Pavel's work on Independent plugins, he or Gerhard will compile for MAC.

[mrm]

Originally Posted by HUR450502

Hi Rick,

I looked a little bit around - mainly because of &quot;carcode's&quot; comments, and yes, after calibration there are parameters changed in the .ini file.

The &quot;vpscale&quot; looked funny, instead of 0.00015 - where I left it, it now changed to some (don't xactly remember the correct value, however) &quot;exponential number&quot; like 8,257 E-0035, or similar. I think the exact value is not interesting, but this extraordinary small scale-factor, as well - and that concerns me - that there is a decimal &quot;comma&quot; instead of a decimal point.

Further the vpLatLon changes such, that the latitude is exactly on a full degree (in my case 42.0000) and the longitude is set to exactly the &quot;ownshipLatLon&quot; longitude. Also the latitude of the &quot;ownshipLatLon&quot; is set to a full degree value - in my case 33.0000

So, these parameters look:

[Settings/GlobalState]
VPLatLon=&quot; 42.0000, -79.2820&quot;
VPScale=0.00015
VPRotation=0
OwnShipLatLon=&quot; 33.0000, -79.2820&quot;
bFollow=0

before they were on some &quot;exact&quot; values like 42.2354 and 33.3580 .

This is also, what I see on the track which is on &quot;full&quot; degrees only..

Does this help a bit, so you don't have to look up everything??

Best regards and have a nice wekend,

Uwe

What you describe _might_ be locale related. Decimal point/comma and misinterpreting/rounding the numbers seem to me to point in this direction. Maybe some IO procedures are not locale agnostic?

Marius

[HUR450502]

Originally Posted by rgleason

Hopefully with Pavel's work on Independent plugins, he or Gerhard will compile for MAC.

Hi Rick, yes, I believe this would be fine generally, as Mac seems to become more and more popular even with "hardcore" window users. The lack of plugins is some kind of drawback here.

However, do not make any extra effort for this particular case. I will need some days (believe me or not, there is - even being a pensioner - still some work to be done besides the "hobby" .... ) and I need to get my hands on a 64 bit version of windows 7 and get all my stuff installed and running properly......

So there may be some days of "radio silence" from my side, as I currently do not have any idea what else I could do, to get any closer to this problem.

However, as soon as I am done, I will give feedback as to the results, ok??

Best regards, Uwe

[HUR450502]

Originally Posted by mrm

What you describe _might_ be locale related. Decimal point/comma and misinterpreting/rounding the numbers seem to me to point in this direction. Maybe some IO procedures are not locale agnostic?

Marius

... yes, Marius, this could be, however, in my opinion I saw this whole stuff running without problems on my PC ....... I believe ....... I am definitely not sure, as I have played around with so many things in the meantime....
I had this thought earlier, but do no know if there was any change in my system in the meantime.....

Anyway thanks for the hint, best regards, Uwe

[HUR450502]

Marius,

you are THE HERO!!!!!!

I went to the control panel and changed my regional settings - to be precise - the number separators to the - of course totally wrong american style with a decimal point and a thousand separator as comma - brrrrrr - and guess what happened.......


Everything is bright and beautiful now.....

So, who could think about to get even these nasty and ignorant Germans "converted" to become believers and users of the american numbering scheme or is there any mercyful soul, that would tolerate these people living still in the "stone - age" and use their old (still common there) stuff by trying to find out, how to change some OpenCPN routines to handle these changes???

Honestly, I am a bit miffed, that I didn't do this change earlier, especially as I remember to have had this kind of thought already.....

OK, but this is what a community is for...

Thanks again Marius, great and cool thinking!!!! Congratulations....

Best regards to all participating in this and many thanks for patience and all the efforts to help me here.

Uwe

P.S.: Rick, I believe, we should award a "medal of honour" to Marius ...... What do you think?? (On the other hand, what argument should I use now to explain to my wife that I MUST change my system to 64 bits .... :-(

[rgleason]

Uwe, I think Marius and you should share the award, Marius for suggesting the solution and you for your persistence. Glad you figured it out. Congratulations!

[HUR450502]

Hi Rick,

thanks....... However, Marius seems to have a very "unemotional down to earth" approach... Very good.

Anyway, I never had problems with OpenCPN in the past and without using the calibration function in the weatherfax plugin, everything seems to work fine, therefore, I believe, we need to look into this, as this is either a bug or a restriction, which should be made known to all the poor guys, who use this with "non american standard" decimal separators, do you agree??


Best regards, ad again, many thanks for all your efforts - and for this tool (an error can happen everywhere and does not negate the excellent functionality etc... )

Uwe

[rgleason]

Uwe where are you entering "non standard" separators exactly? I lost that part of it.