On Wed, 8 Jul 2009 00:28:00 -0700 (PDT), Paul Crabtree
wrote:

Hopefully John will pick up on the message and be able to help regards
his software which is producing reliable bright sunshine hour readings
comparable with my old sunshine recorder.

Yes indeed I've just seen this.

Please remember that WLR** is currently still in beta - the version
available at present is intended more as a demonstrator of what the
program can do than as a polished final product with all the
calculated values properly validated. There still are at least a
couple of significant bugs to iron out in the calculations so I would
caution against using the results for any formal archival purposes for
the time being, though in general they should provide reasonable
provisional indications of final values.

I'm sorry that this beta state for WLR has lasted much longer than I'd
planned - it's really just a question of how much time I get to work
on background projects like this and the answer is not much recently.
Unfortunately as most part-time programmers will testify, program
development is not something that's easily done with an hour here and
an hour there - you really need a solid block of time, eg a week or
two of dedicated time, to remember where you'd got to with a program
and then make some further progress.

I've got one other major project that I'm currently working on, but
when that's done - maybe September time - then I'll aim to make WLR
the next priority and really look to make a properly validated version
available. And certainly, to answer the original point, if there are
any further parameters that can be readily calculated and included
then I'll be happy to do so. (But they need to be parameters likely to
be of general interest and/or eg in the COL specification and not
highly specialist or idiosyncratic ones - I don't want to add items
unlikely to be of wider interest to what is already a fairly long
parameter list and hence make life more confusing for the average
user.) I think what I'll aim to do is to release a new beta version in
the autumn and then invite any comments/suggestions for any extra
parameters or features that user might like to see.

**For anyone wondering what this is all about: WLR is a program called
Weatherlink Reporter which can read the monthly archive files that the
Davis VP/VP2 weather stations produce and can then generate very
flexible and comprehensive monthly reports from that data, including
the option of output in PDF format.

John Dann
www.weatherstations.co.uk