Known limitations
- RGB color specs (rgb:N/N/N) in sizes other than 24 bits
(rgb:hh/hh/hh) generally will not work.
- Time begins on January 1, 1970 and ends on December 31, 2037. Attempts
to generate tide predictions at or near these boundaries will blow up.
- All timestamps have a precision of plus or minus one minute.
- All predictions are made to an accuracy of plus or minus one minute (in
the mathematical sense, not in the sense of matching up with the real
world).
- URLs assigned to specific locations by the xttpd web server are
rather transient and will change whenever the harmonics files are
updated. The xttpd web space will remain internally consistent, but
hyperlinks from outside pages will be screwed.
Known bugs
- If two events (e.g., high tide and full moon) happen to coincide very
closely, within 1 minute of each other, and you reverse the direction of
the scrolling in the interactive plain mode window at a point where only one
of the events is visible, you might be able to make the other one
disappear.
Cause of bug: accuracy of predictions, precision of timestamps.
Workaround: don't do that.
- Some of the dialog windows cause harmless but annoying toolkit
warnings when you dismiss them.
Cause of bug: don't understand what the toolkit grabs are doing.
Workaround: ignore warnings.
- In the interactive plain mode window only, tide events can be listed out
of order for subordinate stations.
Cause of bug: design conflict. Efficient scrolling is incompatible
with keeping the list sorted.
Workaround: save the predictions to a file and they will be sorted.
- Tide graphs and raw output for subordinate current stations won't mesh
with the predicted times of slack water.
Cause of bug: The interpolation algorithm used to produce tide graphs for
subordinate stations doesn't do slack water.
Workaround: none.
- Line width in line graphs isn't maintained when the slope of the
graph becomes drastic.
Cause of bug: need better algorithm for drawing line graphs.
Workaround: set the aspect higher.
- Multiple data sets having the same name cannot be distinguished, and it
is not deterministic which one you will get.
Cause of bug: data sets are keyed by name.
Workaround: If the same location appears in multiple harmonics files,
choose which version you want to use and remove the other harmonics file
from your HFILE_PATH.
-
The fast loader can get confused if there are locations that start
with non-alphabetic characters or if there are lines in the file that
are longer than 1000 characters.
Cause of bug: performance optimization of fast loader requires these
compromises.
Workaround: don't do that.
-
Buttons will sometimes shift out from under the mouse pointer and get
"stuck on."
Cause of bug: (1) button moves due to changing geometry of other things
in the box, leading to (2) button shifts out from under the pointer,
which triggers (3) bug in Athena Widgets where the button release event
gets lost.
Workaround: As needed, click on the stuck button to un-stick it. This
problem can be prevented in the control panel by specifying a fixed-width
font with the -fn switch, which avoids (1). The bug is less likely in
other windows.
- There are edge effects at the start and end of an interval chosen for
subordinate station predictions. Some events that are inside of the
interval may be excluded, and vice-versa.
Cause of bug: While the interval is faithfully scanned for the reference
station, tide events can jump in or out of the chosen interval after the
offsets are applied.
Workaround: Leave a margin around the interval of interest that is
larger than the offsets of the subordinate station (a few hours should
suffice).
- The analog tide clock icon flashes when it updates, and doesn't update
at all under some window managers. Alternate symptom: tide clocks
crash the window manager at random.
Cause of bug: Window managers don't expect icons to keep changing and
aren't designed to handle it properly.
Workaround: Use a window manager that doesn't suck.
- Dialog boxes don't behave like you would expect when you hit
the Enter key. Cause of bug: Athena widgets use multi-line buffers
even for one-line fields. Workaround: Don't hit Enter.