Dharma Wheel

ngodrup wrote:Kirtu,

The calendar for last year was so helpful, thank you so much.
I'm eager to see water dragon 2139.
Hope it's coming out soon.

Thanks Ngodrup!

I was hoping to have it out by now but I was delayed. I hope to have a beta version out within 24 hours and a better version in a month.

Kirt

I do have an alpha version of the Tibetan calendar for 2139, the Water Dragon year, available here.

Unfortunately my ISP has disallowed Java JAR files so this is an actual compressed zip file. I also tried to upload the JAR file here but the board also disallows JAR files. So you will need to unzip it after you download it in order to run it. I have not been able to test this on a Windows machine yet so I don't know for sure how it looks under Windows.

I will try to remedy the situation by hosting the program on another ISP and also by generating a native Windows executable. However I don't know if that can be done for Mac's. So for right now, if you want to use this calendar you will unfortunately have to extract it/uncompress it by hand.

This isn't changed much over the previous year except that the dates are correct for the Water Dragon Year and I have expanded a bit on the Buddha days and added Bodhisattva days according to the scheme outlined on Jeff Watt's discussion of Tibetan Holy days. As such, this may reflect an unintentional Sakya bias.

I have not had time to add Parinirvana dates and birthdays (exepct for HH 14th Dalai Lama's Birthday which I also included in 2138). I will include these dates and add other enhancements within about a month. So another version is on the way.

Happy Water Dragon Year!

Kirt

I'm going to be complete bastard and ask why you haven't included dakini and naga days.

Oooooops, I just noticed that the dakini days are listed! Sorry!

gregkavarnos wrote:I'm going to be complete bastard and ask why you haven't included dakini and naga days.

I have included Dakini Days (every 25th day) but they aren't broken down in more detail. I forgot about Naga Days and haven't really come across them much in discussions on the Tibetan calendar.

Perhaps you could give me more detailed feedback on what you would like to see. So Naga Days are apparently inauspicious days for raising prayer flags (and perhaps more) - I had planned on adding these (inauspicious days to raise prayer flags) but was too far behind on this version so these will appear in the update coming in a month or so. I looked up Lama Dawa's explanation on prayerflags.com - these seem to be calculated according to the Kalachakra calendar. This could lead to conflicting or numerous lists of inauspicious days between the three calendar systems (or possibly not). So Naga Days may have to be calendar system selectable by the user, which is not a problem. I just need the data. So I will look into this immediately.

Thanks!

Kirt

I updated the Tibetan Calendar for the Water Dragon Year adding Naga offering days and showing bad days to raise prayer flags. You can download it from my website. It is still packaged as a zip file for now. I have not been able to find hosting for it just as a JAR file yet. If you don't know how to unzip files, then I can email the calendar to you (but under Mac and Windows you just double-click and should extract it immediately, possibly to a temporary directory - you would then move it to your desktop or wherever you wanted it to reside).

I used multiple sources for the Naga days and prayer flags days. These aggreed with each other except for a few days. When a discrepancy arose I took the more conservative rout. This added a few bad days to raise prayer flags and in three cases turned a good day for a Naga offering into a bad day (this happened once) or a neutral day into a bad day (this happened about twice).

I'll get the Rigpa calendar shortly and see what they say.

So my sources are the Nitartha published calendar for 2012, the "Naga Serpent Spirit Puja Days From Tibetan text kLu Thebs dang Phan Yon bCas bZhugs so" pdf that Greg sent me, and data from Saraswati Bhawan, especially their "Du-Khor Be-kar Naga days according to the astrology of the Kalachakra, which is based on the Yajurved" that Ngodrub sent me.

I still need to add Parinirvana days and birthdays.

Kirt

Dear Kirtu,

I have uploaded the program file to the public folder in my Dropbox account. This format does not require extraction. All one needs to do is download from here http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9844773/TibetanCalendar2139.jar" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and then run the program.

Now that is cool!

It actually shows the degree of benefit to nagas.
Now can you post a legend? I assume a white box
without dots means a neutral day and a black box
is a "dok" -- inauspicious.

Also I assume that red "x" means "badens"--
inauspicious for prayer flags.

gregkavarnos wrote: I have uploaded the program file to the public folder in my Dropbox account. This format does not require extraction. All one needs to do is download from here http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9844773/TibetanCalendar2139.jar" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and then run the program.

Thanks Greg!

ngodrup wrote:Now that is cool!

Thanks!

It actually shows the degree of benefit to nagas.
Now can you post a legend?

Yes, white box is neutral, black is dok, red X is baden.

Mouse over the icon and the explainatory tool top will show.

One small glitch.

Since you added the naga and prayer flag days it caused the existing text in the calender to move down three lines (to accomodate the new text and boxes) BUT the window size remained the same.

This means that the text at the bottom of the window is cut off without the possibility for the user to change the window size or scroll down, thus the text cannot be read.

gregkavarnos wrote:One small glitch.

Since you added the naga and prayer flag days it caused the existing text in the calender to move down three lines (to accomodate the new text and boxes) BUT the window size remained the same.

This means that the text at the bottom of the window is cut off without the possibility for the user to change the window size or scroll down, thus the text cannot be read.

Thanks! I thought I had fixed that. Could you please take a screenshot and email it to me? Does it happen on every day, or most days or a handful of days. What kind of a machine are you running it on?

Java is not very precise about the placement of components from machine configuration to machine configuration. I was very disappointed with a first view on a Windows machine last year although it was perfect on my Linux machine and I was not able to test it on a Windows or Mac machine this year.

Kirt

kirtu wrote:Thanks! I thought I had fixed that. Could you please take a screenshot and email it to me? Does it happen on every day, or most days or a handful of days. What kind of a machine are you running it on?

Java is not very precise about the placement of components from machine configuration to machine configuration. I was very disappointed with a first view on a Windows machine last year although it was perfect on my Linux machine and I was not able to test it on a Windows or Mac machine this year.

I'll be glad to, once you tel me how to take a screen shot on windows vista.

gregkavarnos wrote:

kirtu wrote:Thanks! I thought I had fixed that. Could you please take a screenshot and email it to me? Does it happen on every day, or most days or a handful of days. What kind of a machine are you running it on?

Java is not very precise about the placement of components from machine configuration to machine configuration. I was very disappointed with a first view on a Windows machine last year although it was perfect on my Linux machine and I was not able to test it on a Windows or Mac machine this year.

I'll be glad to, once you tel me how to take a screen shot on windows vista.

Thanks Greg - I'll have to check (because Vista is pretty different from other versions of Windows but the standard method is to get the image on the screen and press the SHIFT and PrtScr keys at the same time - these will vary from keyboard to keyboard (well, PrtScr will) - but I also need to check that that is true for European and/or Aussie keyboards.

This will not obviously work but if it does work then the screen shot is in computer memory. So open Paint or graphics software and import the image using the Paste command (on most software under an Edit option).

The Vista documentation says just hit the PrtScr key for the whole window or Alt-PrtScn for the active window. So you may not need to use the Shift key at all.

Kirt

I slapped together a pocket calendar for people to print out. I didn't include Naga days since there can be more than one auspicious Naga day per month. Just basic practice days for the rest of 2012.

Just right click on the image and "save" or "print".

Dear Kirtu,
I have a reported problem from a windows 7 user, their PC comes up with a "windows cannot open this program" message whenever they try to run the .jar

gregkavarnos wrote:Dear Kirtu,
I have a reported problem from a windows 7 user, their PC comes up with a "windows cannot open this program" message whenever they try to run the .jar

There are a handful of possibilities but they all come down to the Java runtime not installed on the machine or not being installed correctly or possibly prohibited from running due to the machine being locked down for security reasons.

This link is a brief solution. So probably I will need to just write a native Windows solution but actually my version of Visual Studio and C# is the 2003 version and I am now not sure that it will run on all Windows machines because .Net has been significantly updated and may not be totally backward compatible. I will look into this.

Kirt

The Tibetan Calendar I am supporting lists May 6 rather than May 5 as the full moon day. This is because I took the full moon dates from the NASA moon almanac although I also took as much data as possible from other Tibetan calendar sources.

NASA lists today's full moon as occurring at May 6 at 3:35 am GMT. I just took the date without thinking about it since that would be 11:35 pm 5 May.

I am looking for other possible errors and am verifying the calendar with other sources.

Kirt

I have the Rigpa calendar and am going through it now. So far everything matches up. At first it appeared that there were no Naga days but Rigpa does have the major Naga days and this confirms May 26 as a Naga day. I will also pay attention to the other notations. Additionally I will have to add location specific lunar phases shortly in order to avoid lunar phase problems.

Kirt