This program was inspired by the !StormSiren application written by Roy !McManus <slorf@users\sourceforge/org>.   Much like the original !StormSiren, !StormSiren is a simple script capable of scanning and providing notifications of weather bulletins issued by the National Weather Service.      !StormSiren supports a wide range of paging devices and filtering of alert types per alert device.  While inspired by !StormSiren, this program is a complete rewrite that is capable of using the new CAP/XML feeds provided at !http://www.weather.gov/alerts/.

You can find Roy's story at the original [http://stormsiren.sourceforge.net/#motivation StormSiren website.]

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.