gweather patches: wind chill, radar

[Michael Hicks <hick0088 tc umn edu>]

I sent a message yesterday pertaining to a patch including wind chill
index calculations in gweather.  (I was not subscribed to gnome-devel at
that time, so that message is sitting in the moderation queue right
now.)  I wrote the patch from the development branch version of
gweather.  However, there isn't much difference between the stable
version and the devel version, though the patch applies to both.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/files/gweather-windchill.diff

Today, I am happy to say that I have also re-enabled the code for
fetching radar images.  It works for the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii,
and Puerto Rico.  If someone adds Guam to the Locations database, it
should work there too.  There's a cheap one-liner in the code that
allows Canadian cities along the border of the US (Toronto, Montreal,
etc) to use US radar images.  The same thing could probably be done for
some Mexican cities.  This patch should also apply to both the devel and
stable branches.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/files/gweather-radar.diff

One problem with the current images that I download (from
http://weather.noaa.gov/) is that they are 620x620.  Add a window border
and a button or two, and the resulting window barely fits on a 1024x768
screen.  One solution might be to scale the images, but I'm not sure how
well that would work..

The thing that really took a lot of time was changing the Locations
database to work with the new radar site names.  I would not say that
the work I did on it is anywhere near `correct', and by no means did I
try to go through and find a good radar site for each city in the
database.  If you live in the US, please take a moment to figure out a
good radar site for your area.  (You'll probably want to start here:
http://weather.noaa.gov/radar/mosaic/DS.p19r0/ar.us.conus.shtml)  In the
locations database, the radar site name is the last 3 characters in each
row.  These 3 characters are visible on the top and bottom of the radar
images, to the left of the time and date.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/files/gweather-Locations


If someone feels inclined, there are several things that can be improved
in gweather.  Here are a few ideas:
  1. animated radar
  2. retrieve composite (long-range) radar images as well
  3. weather watch and warning notification
  4. sanely handle these large images on small displays

I might do some of that stuff eventually, but not right now -- I need to
get some homework done this weekend ;-)

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   Gravity brings me down. 
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__                              
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)                             
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 tc umn edu ]