root/README

StormSiren

StormSiren is a personal severe weather monitoring and alerting tool
that communicates National Weather Service issued bulletins on 
weather forecasts, alerts, statements, watches and warnings.  The
program is designed to run via a scheduling program (such as cron or 
a windows scheduler) and scan the NWS CAP based XML feeds and 
provide alerting information based on user defined locations and filters.
When alerts are detected that match user defined criteria, the program 
sends a concise summary of the alert to one or more devices.  

StormSiren is capable of sending alerts to many types of devices.
These devices include:

   * Email
   * SMS
   * Jabber
   * Media
   * MythTV
   * External Programs
   * OSD (On Screen Display)

The summaries are designed to contain the type of alert, the 
affected counties and cities defined by the user, and the issue and 
expiration times of the alerts.

StormSiren is written in the Python programming language.  It
has been developed and tested under Python version 2.5, though earlier 
versions of the language will likely work as well.  It has been tested
on a number of platforms, including Linux, Solaris 2.8, OS/2 Warp, 
Windows 2000, and Windows 98.  

In order to run StormSiren, you'll need to have Python on your system.
If you don't already have it, you can get it from www.python.org.  
If you are a windows user, you may be able to run the program by 
double clicking the program if the distribution supports it.  For
Unix/Linux users, you may or may not need to modify the first line
shebang and/or set the file permissions properly.  RedHat users may 
want to change the shebang to #!/usr/bin/env python2.

In order to use StormSiren, you will need to create two configuration
files.  Examples of these files can be found in the examples directory
in the root of this directory.  Information about these files can be
found by visiting the website:

         http://www.cfreeze.com/trac/stormsiren/wiki/Configuration

Once you have your configuration setup, you'll want to test it by
running the program with the '-t' directive.  This will send
a test alert to all your configured devices, to make sure you have 
things running correctly.  

Example:
Unix:     ./siren -t
Windows:  c:\Python25\python.exe siren -t

Once you've got your configuration file set up, you can schedule the 
program to run automatically.  I normally run it under a cron clone 
called Cron/2 on an OS/2 box of mine.  Unix/Linux cron works fine as
well.  Under Windows 2000/XP the Windows scheduler can be used for
scheduling, and the AT command provides the same function under NT 4.0.

StormSiren can send two types of messages, short text (SMS) and full text.
SMS mode sends short text messages to SMS type devices such as MythTv,
cell phones, pagers, and wireless enabled PDAs.  Full text (e-mail) mode
sends the full text of the NWS bulletin.  This allows you to get an alert 
on your wireless device, and then you can check the full details of the 
alert if you have quick access to your mail, or otherwise check your local 
TV news or radio if not.



Additional information on the program is included at the StormSiren web 
site at http://stormsiren.sourceforge.net.





 *** Many thanks to Rory McManus <slorf@users.sourceforge.net> ***
     ***   for his original concept of StormSiren   ***