Weather forecast via twitter

Ages ago I thought it would be handy to have a local weather forecast delivered to my phone, for free. Then twitter came along and it looked like that might provide a possibility. By this time I'd come across the BBC weather RSS feeds.

I tried a couple of "RSS to twitter" services and both worked once and then never again. Google app engine looked like a good way of finding a server to do the stuff to join RSS to twitter. So I cobbled together bits of Python code and came up with this:

(Paste in code from feedparser.org. Comment out the main program stuff.

# Cobbled together from

# http://highscalability.com/using-google-appengine-little-micro-scalability

# http://pydanny.blogspot.com/2008/04/feedparser-does-not-work-with-google.html

import wsgiref.handlers

from datetime import *

import urllib

from google.appengine.api import urlfetch

import base64

import feedparser

import StringIO

from google.appengine.ext import webapp

def getWeather():

content = urlfetch.fetch("http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/2111.xml").content

d = feedparser.parse(StringIO.StringIO(content))

if d.bozo == 1:

raise Exception("Can not parse given URL.")

return d['entries'][0]['title']

class WeatherText(webapp.RequestHandler):

def get(self):

self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/html'

self.response.out.write(getWeather())

self.response.out.write('

supported by backstage.bbc.co.uk')

class UpdateWeather(webapp.RequestHandler):

def get(self):

self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/plain'

login = "wycombeweather"

password = "password"

message = getWeather()

payload= {'status' : message, 'source' : 'wycombeweather'}

payload= urllib.urlencode(payload, True)

# Get rid of degree marks because they turn out as question marks in the final tweet

payload = payload.replace('%3F','')

base64string = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (login, password))[:-1]

headers = {'Authorization': "Basic %s" % base64string}

url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"

result = urlfetch.fetch(url, payload=payload, method=urlfetch.POST, headers=headers)

self.response.out.write(result.content)

def main():

application = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/', WeatherText),

('/updateweather',UpdateWeather)],

debug=True)

wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)

You can see the results at twitter.com/wycombeweather and wycombeweather.appspot.com. If you want to do it for your local UK weather you'll need to change the figure 2111 above and use your own twitter account.

Presentations and Powerpoint

My colleague, Phil Prior, and I did a session this morning on presentations and use of Powerpoint. He has written up his thoughts on presentations.

We did a more advanced course last week. On that one I covered a number of steps to ensure things go smoothly. I hadn't practised what I preached (run through it on the actual equipment beforehand), and when I opened up clip art the PC froze so I had to borrow a laptop from one of the participants and carry on from there!

My 1.5 seconds of fame

The BBC Digital Revolution people (putting together a 4 programme series on the web and stuff) asked on Twitter if anyone had questions for Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty.



Her answer:


Original blog entry: Tim Berners-Lee and Shami Chakrabarti interview clips (Video): web privacy and obsession

(cross posted to my personal blog)

A picture of a radio programme in the making

I don't often point to other blogs, because you might as well just read them, but this one was worth highlighting. David Ker has put a photo on one of his blogs showing him at work producing a radio programme with Bible material. Click on the picture to see what the numbers in the stars mean.

Expedia no longer supports Passport/Windows Live id

I've searched blogs and looked on techmeme.com, but I can't find any reference to this. I got an email today from Expedia saying they no longer support .Net Passport aka Windows Live id.

When you click on the "Why?" link you get this. Which isn't really a satisfying explanation.

An old hard disk and a new video

A few months ago someone from Wycliffe Canada contacted me. There was an old hard drive in the UK that had some music on it that he wanted to put on a video that he was producing. He wanted me to get the music off it and send it to him on a new hard drive.

The hard drive possibly hadn't been used since 2002. The hard drive was sent to me, and because it was in Mac format I got a colleague who used a Mac to help me get the files off. The drive span up OK and we started getting files off it, but then after 15 minutes or so it died mid-copy. It was pretty terminal and I couldn't get it to work at all after that. Not all of the original files for the music were there, but, thank God, the final mix of all files was there, including the song that was required.

This song now appears on a DVD. Here's the preview, but not with the song though:

Optimistic search button

This bike spares had an "I'm feeling lucky" button next to its search box, but then it changed on one page to this: