[GLLUG] Weather-info options

[Charles Ulrich]

On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Michael Rudas <audiotech50 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is mostly for our North American-based list members.
>
>  Severe weather is a concern this time of year.  For years, I have been
>  using the advertising-supported WeatherBug and an ad-free alternative,
>  Weather Pulse under Microsoft Windows -- but was not aware of
>  alternatives under Linux, so I decided to take a look at The Weather
>  Channel and AccuWeather.
>
>  Of course, you can always go to their respective websites to view
>  current conditions:
>  <http://www.weatherbug.com>
>  <http://www.accuweather.com>
>  <http://www.weather.com>
>  but that's a bit of a hassle.
>
>  Fortunately, The Weather Channel and AccuWeather both provide free
>  downloads and services.  For those of us that run Linux or Mac OS X,
>  both services provide Firefox extensions.  Since Firefox extensions
>  are OS-agnostic, they run fine in any environment that supports
>  Firefox. Both also offer a variety of toolbars and widgets for a
>  variety of environments.
>  <http://www.accuweather.com/downloadcenter.asp>
>  <http://www.weather.com/services/downloads/index.html>

I'm a rather big fan of http://weather.gov. It's ad-free, uncluttered,
and a lot less "dumbed down" than commercial sites. They're the ones
that provide a lot of raw data to the commercial weather sites, so
you're getting the info straight from the horse's mouth. Every time I
get bored and go browsing around weather.gov and related sites, I
always end up finding something cool.

I'm not a big fan of AccuWeather, by the way. In 2005, they sponsored
(through Senator Rick Santorum) a bill that would prohibit the
National Weather Service (NWS) from being able to provide its weather
data directly to the public. With this legislation, you'd have to pay
for your weather updates _twice_. Once to get the data collected in
the first place through a tax-funded government agency and then again
to a company that merely formats the data on nice colorful web pages.
It would also mean the end of free applications that grab weather data
directly from the NWS website or servers. Thankfully, the bill got
zero support and died quietly.

I'm a litle dismayed though that there do not appear to be any Firefox
extensions that make use of the weather.gov data. The GNOME Weather
Report Applet says that it gets its information from a variety of
sources including the NWS.

Charles