Setup page for

Basic Meteorology

 

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enabled to use these resources.

 

Always enter the course through this page

technical prerequisites

setup guide

This page is the gateway to a set of course resources employed by some faculty in the Meteorology Department of Penn State University in the teaching of Meteo 2/3, Weather and Society. These resources were designed and created by Alistair B. Fraser, who retains the copyright. Conditions for the use of this material other than in PSU Meteo 2/3 are discussed on the Copyright & permission page in the Preface section of the course. It is always appropriate to send a letter of inquiry. At present, the course is in the early stages of development with only a portion of the material in place. Consequently, you should arrive with low expectations.

It is pointless to enter the course itself unless you have the proper browser and plugins (see below), for without them virtually all of the course resources will either be absent or damaged. Further, it would be best to be operating on a machine which displays at least 256 (8-bit) colors and preferably millions of (24-bit) colors and has at least 24 Mb (preferably much more) of free RAM (memory beyond that required by the system and other programs). Some of the animations and resources are fairly large and so will take a while to download on a slow link. For study purposes this is not much of an issue, but for presentation, a high-speed link or local mirror (again, see the Copyright & permission page) is certainly desirable.

This course material is designed to be used both in the classroom (by the instructor) and the dormitory room (by the student). A discussion of the motivations for designing a course presentation in this manner can be found by pressing the button (the image) to the right. To facilitate the presentation of this material in the classroom, a classroom interface has been built. When you enter the course (the black and white button below on the left), the present window is replaced with a another one containing new controls along the bottom rather than the standard controls across the top.

If, and only if, you have the proper browser installed, its preferences set correctly, and have the necessary plugins installed (see below), should you click on the button to the left and enter the course.

Prerequisites to viewing this course material

Computers in PSU labs should have the latest software already installed, but if you are setting up your own machine, install new software each semester as manufacturers upgrade it frequently. The images to the right are buttons which provide links to places to obtain the software.

If you are not running the Netscape Browser, 4.7.6 , get and install it. Note: Do not install either IE or Netscape 6.0 as each has deficiencies that prevent some of the course resouces from working. Rather get Nescate 4.7.6 for Windows or for the Mac. Even Netscape 4.73 has a bug in it which breaks some portions of the course which work perfectly on Netscape 4.76. So, GET THE LATEST ONE. YIKES! Shockwave does not yet work with the recently released Netscape 6.0, so you cannot use it. You must download Netscape 4.75 or 4.76.
If you are not running the Shockwave and Flash plugins (players), get and install them. Note: If you had installed the Shockwave plugin a few months ago, it is worth bringing in a updated version. However, the version of Shockwave released in August 2000 (and thereafter has an unfortunate characteristic which sometimes causes the browser to not load all of the resources. The fix for this is posted below in the setup guide.
You must have the appropriate plugins to show QuickTime. It may have been installed automatically with your browser. Remember: For the QuickTime plugin to work, you must also have (the appropriate version of) QuickTime, itself, installed on your machine. It is available at the same place.

Setup guide for various machines

This material was designed primarily for the classroom and so I felt no need to assume anything but a well equipped machine. I did not constrain design to the minimal capabilities of last year's home machines. Rather it usually demands capabilities (memory, color depth, speed) that will be more characteristic of next year's machines. Thus, depending upon their equipment, not all students will have full access all of the resources. This state of affairs will improve with time. If PSU students cannot review the material in their dormitory rooms, they can always use a Mac in the public labs.

Fonts: I have started using the Cascading Style Sheets, so that the formating on Macs and Windows should now be almost the same.

Memory: Some students have found that things did not work because their machines had inadaquate memory. You should have about 28 to 32 Mb of memory (RAM) available for the program.

UNIX I don't believe that the plugins are available for UNIX, so the course material is not available on that platform.

Netscape 4.7 Versions of Netscape prior to 4.75 have a flaw which causes the browser to crash when loading a page containing both layers and style sheets, a combination used in many places in the course. The fix is simple: update to Netscape 4.75. Netscape 6.0 does not yet work.

Shockwave plugin When the Shockwave plugin loads, it pings its corporate headquarters (it sends a message to Macromedia and then waits for a response).If the connection is not good, this causes a delay in loading or may suppress the loading of some items (such as the course toolbar).The problem vanishes if you trash the file which asks Shockwave to do this. In the Windows OS, the file is called, PluginPing.dll, and is located in the system directory, the path probably being Macromed\Shockwave 8\PluginPing.dll . On a Mac, the file is called, PluginPingLib, and is found in System/Extensions/Macromedia/Shockwave 8/PluginPingLib. Drag the appropriate file out of the Shockwave 8 directory and put it anywhere else and course should then load quickly and properly.

Basic Meteorology, is a set of
resources on the Web employed
within the Meteorology Department
of The Pennsylvania State University,
at University Park, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
All rights are reserved: © Alistair B. Fraser.

Alistair B. Fraser | alistair@fraser.cc