Alpha version of V4.5.0 available

[Tom Keffer]

This alpha version has a number of small tweaks and bug fixes, plus two very useful new features. 

Find it in the usual place. Feedback is welcome!

1. The utility wee_database has new options --add-column, --rename-column, and
--drop-columns for adding, renaming, and deleting columns in the database.  No more 

reconfiguring!

2. There is now limited support for generating JSON in templates, particularly series.

See the document series_tags.md for details. This should make it a lot easier to

generate data to feed to JavaScript charting packages, such as Highcharts, 

Google Charts, etc. This is still experimental, and subject to change! Addresses issue #341.

The small tweaks/fixes:

Improved performance when calculating series using aggregation periods that are
multiples of a day.

Changed NOAA reports to use the 'normalized_ascii' encoding instead of 'utf8'
(which did not display correctly for most browsers). Fixes issue #646.

Plots longer than 2 years use a 6 month time increment.

Uploads to PWSWeather and WOW now use HTTPS. Fixes issue #650.

Fixed bug that prevented the Vantage driver from waiting before a wakeup retry.
Thanks to user Les Niles!

Changed the way of expressing the old "wview" schema to the new V4 way.
Hopefully, this will lead to fewer support issues. Fixes issue #651.

Fixed problem where iterating over a time period without an aggregation would
wrongly include the record on the left.

Fixed bug that caused the incorrect label to be applied to plots where the
aggregation type changes the unit. Fixes issue #654.

Plots now locate the x-coordinate in the middle of the aggregation interval for
all aggregation types (not just min, max, avg). Revisits PR #232.

[Tom Keffer]

Version 4.5.0, Alpha-2 is now available.

I would greatly appreciate it if extension writers, particularly those working with JSON, could give it a spin. It should make it much easier to create the data necessary for interactive Javascript graphs.

For example, creating JSON output with the maximum temperature for each day of the month is as simple as

$month.outTemp.series(aggregation_type='max', aggregation_interval='day').json

This would result in something like:

[[1283324400, 1283410800, 79.825823], [1283410800, 1283497200, 79.224876], [1283497200, 1283583600, 63.921459], ... ]

This is the start time, stop time, and maximum temperature for each day of the month.

Lots of variants are possible. See the document series_tags.md for details.

Find it in the usual place.

-tk