Imperial AND Metric

[Keithj]

Hardly, I find that most of Europe uses meters for everything, including altitude

Height of things like mountains may be in metres or feet. ALTITUDE of aircraft is uniformly in FEET, apart from the former Soviet Union which used metres. I fly all over Western Europe, and have never had anything but feet quoted to me. The approach plates, charts and flight guides quote feet. The altimeter setting is in hPa, not inches of mercury.

Kweather is an aviation weather utility, and needs to display the correct units. Linux seems not to let it. Does anyone know how to solve this?


By the way: in English, meters are those devices with pointers that tell you about voltage and speed and the like. The measure of distance is a metre.

[pdavis68]

Personally, I think metric is the only way to go, and I'm in the U.S. I lived in Mexico for 3 years and while I can easily deal with grams, meters/kilometers, and liters, the really pain is Celsius. It's not just that the conversion is difficult to do in your head, but, I know what 78F feels like and I can tell the difference between 78F and 82F. But if you give it to me in Celsius, I simply have no feel for it at all. I never got used to that.

[bigtomrodney]

I love metric, it's so much more logical. Here in Ireland we just completed our change to metric with all road speeds now fully changed. We've been officially metric since the 70s, but been running dual system. Of all the imperial measures though, fahrenheit has got to be the most ridiculous - I mean the scale was based around how cold you could make the human body. Arbitrary or what? At least Celsius and Kelvin have realtively fixed reference point. "Hey we need to invent a new temperature scale" - "Well, we can either base it on something that has a stable temperature range and covers 2/3 of the planets surface, or we can see how cold we can make a human without killing them and then how hot we can make them without killing them, I mean scientific advances will never render that scale useless..."

[psic]

Hardly, I find that most of Europe uses meters for everything, including altitude

Height of things like mountains may be in metres or feet. ALTITUDE of aircraft is uniformly in FEET, apart from the former Soviet Union which used metres. I fly all over Western Europe, and have never had anything but feet quoted to me. The approach plates, charts and flight guides quote feet. The altimeter setting is in hPa, not inches of mercury.

My mistake, I've only flown an airplane in video games.

By the way: in English, meters are those devices with pointers that tell you about voltage and speed and the like. The measure of distance is a metre.

You're right, 'meter' is how it's spelled in my language, I wrote it automatically.

As for your problem, from what I could find out on google, it seems Kweather for now can't do what you would like it to (I got some cached pages from google, couldn't get the pages themselves). You could go throught the code...

[Keithj]

My mistake, I've only flown an airplane in video games.

The real thing is a tiny bit different - and in most of the world, the speed is measured in knots or Mach numbers, and the altitude in feet.

As for your problem, from what I could find out on google, it seems Kweather for now can't do what you would like it to (I got some cached pages from google, couldn't get the pages themselves). You could go throught the code...

Oh well. I don't much fancy working through the code. At the moment I run Kweather in metric with the "wrong units" stuff turned off. I was sort-of hoping someone had written a more user-oriented units-of-measurement software application for Linux.

Thanks for the info - I'm still learning Linux! It's generally brilliant with some infuriating quirks, to my old brain.

[scientica]

The real thing is a tiny bit different - and in most of the world, the speed is measured in knots or Mach numbers, and the altitude in feet.

Height of mountains etc we measure in metre here (in Sweden), airplanes use feet and knots (for air speed) - I guess it's a question of tradition and flight safety in the end (1000 ft. is about 300 m. - mixing those up could be fatal).