| 5 | | I really liked !StormSiren when I first found it several years ago after moving to Texas. It was nice to be able to receive warnings since this area had larger, more violent storms. I was dismayed when it quit working a while back due to changes on the NWS site. At that point I didn't really have a desire to learn Python as my experience when needing to do scripting vis Java or C++ was Perl. However, earlier this month things changed. About a week ago my family in TN was hit by a Tornado. While they were luckier than others, the sheer force of the storm was amazing. What made it even more frightening was that I didn't even know that my family was under the proverbial gun of a tornado producing storm system. I felt helpless as I listened to my sister on the phone of what had happened. After talking to the rest of my family I couldn't help but continue to think about how clueless I was and even they may have been without any warnings. It didn't take me long to think of !StormSiren.[[BR]][[BR]]!StormSirenXml is a total rewrite of Storm Siren to take into account using the new CAP XML feeds from the NWS site. The reason I choose to rewrite !StormSiren was two fold. One I wanted to make it more extensible for the alerting devices. As a result, there are now 5 types of alerting devices that include Email, SMS, Jabber, MythTV, and media playing (extending to new devices should also be made easy). The second reason was I had recently moved to Mercurial for personal configuration management. With it being in python and the fact I would probably want to write plugins for it...I needed to learn python. |
| | 5 | I really liked !StormSiren when I first found it several years ago after moving to Texas. It was nice to be able to receive warnings since this area had larger, more violent storms. I was dismayed when it quit working a while back due to changes on the NWS site. At that point I didn't really have a desire to learn Python as my experience when needing to do scripting vis Java or C++ was Perl. However, earlier this month things changed. About a week ago my family in TN was hit by a Tornado. While they were luckier than others, the sheer force of the storm was amazing. What made it even more frightening was that I didn't even know that my family was under the proverbial gun of a tornado producing storm system. I felt helpless as I listened to my sister on the phone of what had happened. After talking to the rest of my family I couldn't help but continue to think about how clueless I was and even they may have been without any warnings. It didn't take me long to think of !StormSiren.[[BR]][[BR]]!StormSiren is a total rewrite of Storm Siren to take into account using the new CAP XML feeds from the NWS site. The reason I choose to rewrite !StormSiren was two fold. One I wanted to make it more extensible for the alerting devices. As a result, there are now 5 types of alerting devices that include Email, SMS, Jabber, MythTV, and media playing (extending to new devices should also be made easy). The second reason was I had recently moved to Mercurial for personal configuration management. With it being in python and the fact I would probably want to write plugins for it...I needed to learn python. |
