Can you help trouble shoot Sharper Image Internet Weather Station EC-WS115?

Sorry about the grammar I meant to type their not there.  My bad

Hi Ed,

I've been working in professional software development since the very early 90's. Worked a lot on the IBM AS/400 midrange computer, and programmed for DOS and Windows as well. In the past years I've done a lot of Internet stuff (mainly Java/JS) and currently I'm an operations manager for a software company. I don't program that much anymore myself, but am now using my skills to look at the frontend, do some testing, look at the backend, test some more, and then often I'm able to tell the developers exactly what is wrong in their code without even looking at it.

Based on this technique, I can say that the story of a server being moved is baloney. A server either works or it doesn't, it doesn't start sending out wrong details just because somebody already wrapped it in bubblewrap :-)  The only way this would make sense would be if the actual life server was already unplugged, and some backup-server would take over that has a wrong system date or some older code on it that is doing wrong calculations. But again, when I test the response that comes from the server and run it through that epoch converter, I do get a valid date. So I have to conclude that there's nothing wrong with the server.

Now please tell me, where did you find that epoch converter that responded with the same date as the weather station display?

Thanks,

Stefan Viveen

Fraser Valley Software

Hope, BC Canada

Mine has not worked for over a week.  I check it every day and the date seems to advance, but the time is still not correct.  I have tried changing locations (for the weather station) and still no luck.  I'm in Peoria, IL.

Hi Stefan:

   I wasn't clear in my message.  I gave you an additional  website that allows you to put in any epoch and it converts the value to a date or vice versa.  I used the epoch you specified in your messge to get the WS date.  I thought you wanted a different converter.  Here's the URL for it

http://www.esqsoft.com/javascript\_examples/date-to-epoch.htm

1338593037 the value you gave us converts to Fri Jun 1 19:23:57 EDT 2012 local time

My thoughts are that we are seeing data that is buffered or a constant in the WS software on our own PC.  Since the WS time gets incremented I'm at 11/8 5:43 pm about 2 hours 30 minutes off of correct time.  I concede that their story is lame but since there is not much one can do, it will get fixed when it's fixed.  I had people on my crew who could build a server from scratch it less time then they are taking to repair it.   

I worked on the IBM 650, a Bendix with paper tape input, and an  RCA Spectra.  The first machine I coded you had 32 bits and coded in binary.  I woud do about 15 instructions a day.  I worked with Rear Admiral Grace Hopper from the Navy early developer of Cobol.  By the early sixties I was coding in BAL (basic assembly language).  My first Burroughs machine was the B200 and it had all of 4800 characters of core so you coded using overlays to bring in chunks of programming as needed.  Now I feel really old.

Ah, I've figured it out:

The time response coming from server2.netinfostation.com is:

13390343 1339034354 01:59:14 Jun-07-2012.

We've already concluded that the second value is the epoch, which sets the date and time to the application. Now... the first number is supposed to be an offset in seconds. Yes, I know it's just the first eight digits of the epoch, that's why the app doesn't work ;-)

The number above works out to about 155 days. The actual offset should be like 0.9 (probably some delay measured based on the processing of the request).

I've found that server1 does give the correct time response. So I've hacked the executable to make it connect to server1 instead of server2. You can download it (at your own risk, of course... and don't blame me for the bad weather!) from:

http://www.fraservalleysoftware.com/download/5-day forecast.exe

Now what does that mean? There's some very confusing difference between server1 and server2 in the time response. On purpose? Who knows. Did the URL for server 2 used to be redirected to server1, but now because of the move it isn't? Who knows... But at least I expect my fix to help everybody out till the guys at Forecast finished their "move" :-)

Stefan Viveen

Fraser Valley Software

Hope, BC Canada