by Cornelis Bockemühl
The Author of PmAs

 Next version coming soon: Solar eclipses extended

READ ALSO:

What is PmAs?

 The intention is to inform you about what is going to come soon and
about plans going around in my head for the future: Comments and
suggestions are welcome.

Right now, I am finishing and bugfixing a new version of PmAs that
will mainly extend the calculation of Solar Eclipses that was just
started with the last release (version 1.10):

- The "Search for eclipses" module will be more informative about the
eclipses found.

- The "Global conditions" module is very much extended with options
and much more detailed maps and tables.

- Two more modules are added: One that calculates local conditions
for an eclipse for a given locality and another one that calculates
the complete "Saros cycle" a given eclipse belongs to.

This next release is a question of a couple of weeks maximum:
Everything is there already, but there are still serious bugs to be
eliminated...

Better installation procedure

I would like to improve the installation procedure for the PmAs
packages, because it is becoming a bit complicated with different
versions, languages and optional packages. Because I would neither
like to write a complete installer myself nor want to use a
commercial solution for a freeware package, I am considering two
possible solutions:

- SFX Installer by "PillarSoft" (http://www.pillarsoft.com) which is
free for freeware programs. It seems a nice and rather "simple"
installer, but can be extended with REXX scripts to do everything you
want. Advantages: The program exists (!) and I already found out that
Wayne Swanson is very helpful and ready to contribute any information
necessary to get the most out of the installer. Disadvantage:
Probably much work to write all the checks and options etc. as REXX
scripts (...possibly a proprietary solution in C is not so much more
work?!).

- WarpIN, a "OS/2 Netlabs" project (http://www.netlabs.org) looks
very promising as well. It actually does already a number of things
that had to be coded with REXX scripts when using the SFX Installer.
Disadvantages: It is not finished yet (even if the latest developer
version compiled here very well and looks almost fully functional)
and I did not get an answer yet when trying to contact the authors.

My sympathies are right now with the latter solution: What do you
suggest?

Next plans: MySQL client

Already long I missed a more comfortable way to handle all sorts of
astronomical data that are used as input in PmAs, the main categories
being

- Positions of all sorts of objects

- Orbital elements of solar system objects

- Localities (i.e. cities etc.)

Many such data can be found in different places on the internet,
mostly as simple text files. I'm thinking about a simple way to
integrate this kind of external data into all possible calculations
within PmAs without having to write my own database program myself.

Looking around among possible database "candidates" I got more and
more convinced that MySQL could be the solution I am looking for.

Anyway, a PM client program would be needed with the following
capabilities:

- Simple data searching and filtering etc. with SQL commands, a bit
like the "original" client, but PM based and a little bit more
comfortable (recall old commands, save and load commands etc.).

- A simple way to import (and possibly export) data as text: Which
columns are which data element, lines to skip in the beginning and
end etc., possibly using a sort of configuration files for importing
the same table format more than once.

- And last but not least: Drag'n'drop interaction with the PmAs
programs.

Since the first two features might be of general interest also for
handling non-astronomical data I am considering to publish this
database client as a separate program. Of course the time I can spend
for this project is also limited, so I would start with the most
necessary features first.

CONTACT AUTHOR

Cornelis Bockemuehl
cbockem@datacomm.ch
http://www.datacomm.ch/cobo
 

@Macarlo, Inc.
@Macarlo's Shareware & Web
OS/2
Java Lobby Member
Java Site Accredited

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