[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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