[mythtv-users] MythWeather small bug to report
Michael T. Dean
mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Sat Aug 7 10:33:41 EDT 2004
Hamish Moffatt wrote:
>On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 09:01:28AM -0400, Jeff C wrote:
>
>
>>On the topic of MythWeather, I love the feature but my location isn't
>>supported at all. :S I was wondering if there is any active development on
>>MythWeather and whether or not there is any interest in moving to a site
>>like Weather Underground which supports airport codes for lookups...
>>
>>http://www.weatherunderground.com
>>
>>
>That site seems more accurate for non-US weather than the current
>source, at least for Melbourne Australia. That is, the current
>temperature matches what our government forecaster (www.bom.gov.au)
>currently reports.
>
>Unfortunately the 5-day forecast seems to have no correlation to
>the official forecast at all. Pure fantasy even!
>
>Ideally there'd be something like xmltv for weather, allowing
>people to write grabbers for local data. The bom.gov.au site is
>always best for Australia, for example, and it doesn't make much
>sense to be hitting US web sites for local weather.
>
>
Unless, of course, you're the author of MythWeather (and, note that I'm
not); in which case the thought of maintaining a program to "screen
scrape" weather information from hundreds of different websites (which
are constantly being changed by their owners) is probably not a pleasant
one.
The weather data is currently being pulled from MSNBC and the weather
maps from weather.com. Even though I live in the US, I don't really
like the weather data from MSNBC--primarily because it gives relative
humidity, but not dew point (I like to see both). Therefore, I was
looking at weather.com and whether it would be usable as a source.
Pulling the data from weatherunderground.com would be extremely
difficult because of how it's buried within the page. However,
weather.com, like MSNBC, has the data consolidated in a single easy to
parse line. Therefore, modifying MythWeather to use weather.com would
be relatively easy. Unfortunately, though, the page on which the one
line of data exists is about 64KB larger than the one at MSNBC...
So, how's the data at weather.com? Based on an intial look (comparing
MSNBC, weather.com, and weatherunderground.com for Syndey, Australia),
weather.com seems to agree with weatherunderground (whereas MSNBC was
very different). It's possible that there's another way to get that
line of data from weather.com that doesn't involve the extra 64KB of
stuff, but if there's no compelling reason to use weather.com (i.e. much
better data for non-US users while maintaining similary data quality for
US users), it's not worth the time to try to find that way.
Mike
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