Hi Members,
I have put this post off over and over again. I guess I have not wanted to face it. However it is time I honoured our betejuice and posted the below.
Beteljuice stopped posting anywhere back at the end of 2021. Over in the cumulus forum members were privately messaging each other trying to track down his whereabouts but to no avail. In March 2022 a post was started on the cumulus forum regarding his possible passing as he had COPD. The link is here:
https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=20254On behalf of myself and this forum I posted under it. I personally had spent a lot of time with beteljuice between forums and writing scripts. The last thing we spent time on was the data summary and my web site sorting things out to work with PHP 8.
I still miss him, when things go wrong I still think ‘I will ask betel’

Below is what I posted on the cumulus site so we can keep a record of it.
My Tribute to beteljuice.
I have been putting off adding to this thread ever hopeful beteljuice would reappear. But as time marches on the probability of this is slowly diminishing.
Like many of you I first met betel through this forum in 2010, asking for advice regarding the Cumulus Software. betel steered me in the right direction and continued to do so for the next 12 years

At the beginning of 2012 a group of New Zealand Weather Enthusiasts started a new Forum using the SMF Software. We were having issues with the software and I made an approach to betel for help. At that stage we were all manually submitting our yesterday data and from those Daily Data Summaries we manually compiled and uploaded.
betel noticed this and suggested he could code some PHP scripts to do the work for us. Hence began a few months work perfecting this, with many scripts and much time spent around our time zone difference playing

At one stage betel’s scripts were pulling data from 106 stations and laying out the summary but with weather station technology now plugging straight into routers/modems, our scripts are slowly losing the realtime and clientraw txt files that they need. Summary Link below for anyone interested.
http://www.localweather.net.nz/smf/nzlwf-member-historical-data/86/Look back to around January 2015 to get a better idea. To me this has always been one of beteljuice’s master pieces

One of the next project betel and I embarked on was the “Current Conditions” Scripts. I wanted to be able to display the current weather as with sunny, raining, windy etc. I was just using the webtags to do this but betel had other ideas of which months later, I am sure he regretted ever going down this path

. The script started with a few pages and continued to grow trying to cover all conditions and all weather software products. This was months in the making with our time difference not helping. betel suffered from insomnia and would stay up until the sun rose to be in my morning and early pm, writing, sending, rewriting, resending.
If you are unaware of this script, it is here:
https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=12831&hilit=current+conditionsAs with many of our Cumulus Forum Members, my website is running many of betel’s scripts as with the Dayfile Reader, Graphic Sun Chart, Local airport script, the list is many. My knowledge of PHP is pretty much zero but betel taught me heaps making me try coding it myself first before he then rewrote the whole thing

The thought of the next PHP upgrade does not entertain me at all as every time there is an upgrade, many of our weather scripts just bail out. The last upgrade in September last year totally messed up my cloudbase and thermometer plus I had a few blank pages. betel helped fixed these for me and others.
The Weather Forum Data Summary also went belly up and betel spent much time rewriting scripts to fix this. I now see that he would have been struggling with his health at this stage and this pains me greatly.
Through time spent emailing and messaging, betel never hesitated to help me always returning my cry for help immediately. He also had a lot of patience and he sure needed that with me at times when I was totally lost as to what he was explaining. For this I will always be grateful. betel also had lots of ‘muck around ‘php pages and would call on me to test/play with them or to be uploaded to my server to see if they worked. This was the fun betel. Alas I was growled heaps

betel did not like a capital B before his name. If I did not spell it betel, I was corrected. betel also disliked pleasantries. I did not dare type Dear beteljuice and Regards Jenny … oh no slap on the wrist for that .. lol. So messages went more like this:
beteljuice: Jenny fix such in such, that’s not what I said.
Jenny: Ok
The only time I saw the softer side of betel was when his wife passed away. This knocked him badly and I found it hard to express my sympathy through messaging. Betel sent me photos of the Hearse leaving the Church. The back was completely covered with flowers and looked amazing. I had not seen this before. I sincerely hope if we really have lost our beteljuice that family members or friends did the same for him.
His name is through many scripts on my site and it jumps out at me constantly when I am tweaking that which I probably shouldn’t be. There is no way I will and could forget our beteljuice and his valuable time given to me over the years. He was an extremely clever man and as a mentor he taught me heaps. I dread anything going wrong or another PHP upgrade as I am now on my own

Hope to see you again in the future betel, you will remain forever in my head especially when I mess up

Jenny