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Weather Data Available in XML 198

wombatmobile writes "Wired reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week began providing weather data in an open access XML format. Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a format that's not easily deciphered. How will the free and easy availability of valuable data like this in XML affect the development of the web? One example is Tom Groves SVG weather. This type of visualization of XML data is about to fall within easy reach with nothing more than a text editor required as an authoring tool. From March 2005 SVG becomes part of the standard Mozilla/FireFox build. As an example of how web standards are supposed to work, what more could you hope to find?" We mentioned the policy change a few days ago.
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Weather Data Available in XML

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  • by stfvon007 ( 632997 ) <`moc.oohay' `ta' `700ramgine'> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @07:23PM (#11003835) Journal
    Do we get the blue sky of death?
  • by BorisSkratchunkov ( 642046 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @07:26PM (#11003856) Journal
    weather or not I'll use it.....

    I'm sorry, I'm sorry....it's another bad pun....I seriously need to talk to a psychologist about my BPS (Bad Pun Syndrome or Backup Power Supply, which ever you prefer).
  • by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @07:27PM (#11003859)
    The XML requires latitude and altitude...
    OK, you're going to need: (1) a compass, (2) a stopwatch with a second hand, and (3) an astrolabe.

    ...or just look it up in a reference book
  • NOAA? (Score:5, Funny)

    by MP3Chuck ( 652277 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @07:28PM (#11003868) Homepage Journal
    Finally, a *AA action we can be happy about!
  • by Tim_F ( 12524 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @07:29PM (#11003877)
    old people in Korea will make use of it is the only real question here.

    In Korea only old people know thier latitude and longitude.
  • by Eric Giguere ( 42863 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @07:29PM (#11003878) Homepage Journal

    It'll be easier to parse, but it won't be any more accurate.

    Eric
  • by FiReaNGeL ( 312636 ) <fireang3l.hotmail@com> on Sunday December 05, 2004 @07:39PM (#11003930) Homepage
    Looks like Firefox trend of changing names extend even to plugins :) But WeatherFox sounds better in my opinion... which is sad :(
  • by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @07:50PM (#11003986) Homepage Journal
    The NOAA today started releasing accurate targeted weather data in XML format to a wide audience.
    However unfortunately, because of a large slashdotting, you cannot get todays weather until tomorrow.
    Several planned hurricanes were put on hold for a few days because of the disruption.
    Impatient internet users were caught and fined for illegally downloading and sharing todays weather. One user had a large tornado and numerous thunderstorms on his server.
  • by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Sunday December 05, 2004 @08:40PM (#11004247)
    I don't want my damn weather information in XML format. I want it in Microsoft Word format. That is an open format with lots of documentation, and it will never go out of style. XML is complicated, proprietary, and secret, and if you put your data into this format, chances are that you will be locked in to a particular vendor, and if your vendor goes out of business, you will have essentially lost all of your valuable data.
  • by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Sunday December 05, 2004 @08:44PM (#11004261) Homepage
    I hate to rain on your parade, but your attempts to cloud the issues takes a hail of a lot of guts. What are you, three sleets to the wind? It snow wonder you're sorry!
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 05, 2004 @08:44PM (#11004264)
    > By the way, does anyone know how to get rid of all these popup windows I keep getting

    No, but you seem to unknowingly transmitting those dastardly pop-ups via some form of cleverly embedded virus within your posting. I say this because not minutes after reading your post (as a rough gauge about the the time it took me to download that weatherBug thingy) I was also infected!

    Fortunately, I am extremely 1337, and I recognized those dastardly "pop-ups" almost as instantly as dozens of them began appearing on my screen. I must now decipher the intricate workings of your post to extract the Trojan virus lurking within. I suspect some form of Java X Active encoding is hijacking all the lowercase letters "p" within your posting (this is subset of the three infamous j, p, and g exploits effecting all versions of IE Explorer).

    To all .\ inhabits: I am your savour, and you must await my patch to prevent further spread of this X Active Virus Horse. Do not, I repeat do not look or a pay attention to to any /\. posting until, my patch is in place (if desperate you may do so, but you must obfuscate all letter p's with a felt tip marker, unless using a LCD screen, you mustn't write on a LCD display device! that will only intensify matters).

    I will be back shortly with the patch. But, first I must enlarge my penis, attain a massive gambling debt, and masturbate furiously to porn I just purchased with my stack of totally legal off-shore credit cards.

    Let god be with you.
  • by Fishstick ( 150821 ) on Monday December 06, 2004 @12:00AM (#11005279) Journal
    Well, yeah -- but there's a story that goes with this.

    Coupler years ago I found myself on the sucky end of a reorg where I ended up working for this dweeb in Orlando (I'm in Chicago) where he would always do annoying things like ask what the weather was in Chicago and then spend 10 minutes talking about how it was 70 in January in Florida and he couldn't understand how anyone could stand 20 degree weather and then go on to blather about how he had gone fishing and caught fish and cooked them and on and on.

    I had already set up a camera on my workstation long ago for netmeetings and I had occasionally pointed it out the window to show what the weather was like and the traffic down on the tollway below or the little driving range that is across the office park.

    For some reason I got off the phone one day with this guy and decided I didn't want to get any work done for the rest of Friday afternoon and went about setting my camera up as a webcam (I used webcam2000 and then just set up a frames page on my webserver to include the image from the little port 8080 server that webcam2k runs).

    "There, now the asshole can bring this up and take a look at the weather instead of asking me every time he calls!" I told my cube farm neighbors (who didn't work *for* him but still had to deal with his shit on a daily basis).

    Next time he was on a call and asked about the weather, I told him what URL to use. Backfired. "Oh, looks really cold! What is it, like 20 below, bet even worse with the wind chill, huh?"

    So, I wasted another hour or so in frustration (not because I needed to, but because it made me feel a little better) working on the webcam page to download the weather.com feed to show the current temp, wind, conditions, forecast and all that shit.

    "Fucker, now he can just look at that and doesn't have to fukin ask me about the shitty weather in Chicago as a prelude to talking about how much he likes living in Florida and about his boat and what kind of fucking fish he caught last weekend and how he cooked it and what kind of beer he had with it and how could anyone live somewhere like Chicago where it's cold and you can't spend weekends in the Gulf fishing and drinking beer and getting fucked up the ass with a fishing pole. Fucker."

    He still asked me about the weather every fucking day until I quit.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 06, 2004 @03:56AM (#11005965)
    So what is it like in Chicago now? I bet not as warm as here in Florida, sucker ;)

"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein

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