As you may know, the U.S. is changing the Daylight Saving Time rules this year due to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The server currently hosting this site does not yet have the Java patch for this. This means that from the second Sunday in March (the 11th) until the last Sunday in March (the 25th), calendars generated from the Zmanim Calendar Generator will show the zmanim in standard time and not daylight savings time (DST). The same issue will happen in the fall from the last Sunday in October (the 28th) till the first Sunday in November (the 4th). The Java version used by the server should be patched within the next week or 2 to the latest Java 5 (JDK 1.5) version to solve this problem.
Author: Eliyahu
WordPress Hebrew Date Plugin Has a New Home
The Hebrew date Plugin has not been in active development for a while, and I am pleased to announce that it now has a new home at mikeage.net. Mike added a config page as well as a few new options. The plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress Hebrew dates Plugin Page. As a backup, you can also download it from Mike’s Site. In addition to Mike’s work, Jacob Fresco has used the code to create an additional Jewish Date plugin that displays the current Jewish date. This plugin has since been merged to Mike’s version.
Read the following posts at Mike’s site for more details.
Elevation Lookup Added to Zmanim Calendar Generator
A lookup tool for elevation lookup was added to the Zmanim Calendar Generator page. This service is courtesy of Jonathan Stott’s earthtools.org elevation webservice. This Elevation data currently only covers all of mainland Europe (between latitudes 35°N and 60°N and longitudes 35°E and 15°W) and all of the contiguous states of the United States of America (between latitudes 20°N and 50°N and longitudes 65°W and 125°W). The source of the data is:
The terrain model used to find heights above sealevel is from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) which was a joint project between the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Data was recorded for 11 days from the Space Shuttle Endevour from 11th February 2000. The data used here is at a resolution of 3 arc seconds (approximately 90m).
The lookup is done via an AJAX call.
Java Zmanim API Update
The first phase of change to allow easier porting to other languages took place with the change in the API from using inheritance of the Java Calendar classes, to one that uses composition. This will make porting it to other languages easier. Included in the update are a number of new zmanim, mostly the addition of a number of new calculations for plag hamincha that are useful when trying to avoid a tartai desasri with early erev shabbos minyanim.
Site Upgrade
I just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.0.2, upgraded a few plugins and upgraded the Zmanim Calendar Generator to use v2 of the Google Maps API. I hope to have an update available for the Zmanim API that will allow easier porting to different languages. This will necessitate changing the API from using inheritance of the Java Calendar classes, to one that uses composition. I will try to keep you posted on this progress.