Re: GWeather suckage

[Kevin Vandersloot <kfv101 psu edu>]

Hi Jeff. What we need is a program that parses forecast data from
somewhere off the net and output it to separate xml files for each city
on weather.gnome.org. Once we do that the applet frontend is pretty
trvial to get working.

The problem beyond just finding someone to write this, is where to get
the data from. Weather.interceptvector.com just parsed forecasts from
msn.com which may have some legal issues involved (note that both the
current gweather and the stock ticker might have this same problem -
gweather pulls radar maps from weather.com and stock-ticker pulls data
from yahoo I think).

Currently gweather gets it's forecast data from noaa and metoffice(for
non us stuff). This may be actually legal, but as many have noticed it
generally is not very good for non US cities. There doesn't seem to be a
good way to parse forecast data from these sites either. The current
forecast data that the applet gets for US cities is really unformatted
and hard to read.

It would be best if we could just parse data from weather.com for
instance since it has parity for US/non-US cities (msn seems to have
some small issues I've noticed, but gets its data from weather.com).
Otherwise maybe somebody knows where to get all the data legally. Maybe
we can contact weather.com and see if we can use their data.

Also the guy who wrote weather.interceptvector.com offered to donate his
code to us. The only problem is that he can't be contacted since he and
his web service have been bumped off the net ;)

So these are our options. I agree that it is a shame to have to revert
back to the 2.2 applet.

Regards,
Kevin

On Thu, 2003-07-17 at 11:42, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Kevin Vandersloot">
> 
> > Hi Luis. Yah, it would have helped, we just needed someone with time to
> > set up weather.gnome.org ;) It's really just a problem with the server
> > being down (and no way to contact the admin). We can consider it for 2.6
> > since all the changes are still in the gweather-improve branch.
> 
> Can you mail me with what you need some time? The new gweather stuff was
> working very well while the backend was up, and it would be a shame for it
> to disappear because we can't provide our own.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> -- 
> linux.conf.au 2004: Adelaide, Australia         http://lca2004.linux.org.au/
>  
>     "...and did you know that Twisties have real cheese in them?" - Dave
>         "I didn't even think they had real twists in them!" - Andrew