First, the general-interest stuff:
Item: Becky and I were in New Jersey this past weekend to visit ***Jenn|http://junefourteenth.blogspot.com/***. We came to watch her in the ***Ridgewood G&S|http://www.ridgewoodgands.com/*** production of ***Patience|http://www.dancaster.com/RidgewoodGandS/currentshow_home.htm***. She did a lovely job as one of the “Rapturous Maidens”. 🙂 We also made a side trip to ***IKEA|http://www.ikea.com/***. This was my first visit to one, and I must say that I was quite impressed! The store was absolutely enormous! Becky and I ended up getting a brand new coffee table, regularly priced at $99, for only $9.99. What a bargain! You can see the photos from IKEA and the musical ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/visiting_jenn***.
Item: Becky started work at the ***Otis House Museum|http://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/homes/otis.htm*** on Friday! The organization was previously known as “The Society for the Preservation of New England Activities” (SPNEA), but between the time she was hired and her start date, they changed their name to “Historic New England”. Perhaps she will provide more details to our readers at a later time… today is just her second day of work so far. 🙂
Now for more geeky matters…
Item: As ***Will|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/*** ***mentioned|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/001822.html***, ***Apple|http://www.apple.com/*** has just released a nifty toy called the ***AirPort Express|http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/***. This is basically a scaled down version of their AirPort Extreme Base Station, which connects to your cable or dsl line, local network, or modem, and provides wireless internet access to anyone in the vicinity. The AirPort Express is much smaller (fits in the palm of your hand), and has an extra added feature called ***AirTunes|http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/airtunes.html***. This lets you send music over your network to the AirPort Express from another computer running iTunes. The APE can then plug directly into a stereo system or speakers via an audio jack. Pretty nifty. At $129, it’s almost half the price of its larger bretheren, so it is quite a good deal.
Item: Apple has also just released some new ***PowerMacs|http://www.apple.com/powermac/***. The high end is now a dual 2.5 GHz G5 with a new ***liquid cooling|http://www.apple.com/powermac/design.html*** system. Steve Jobs had previously promised 3.0 GHz machines by the end of this summer, so it still remains to be seen if he will deliver on that promise. The liquid cooling may be the first step in making that happen.
Item: I don’t know when this happened, but the iTunes Music Store now has Radio Charts. Just bring up the iTMS, click on Radio Charts on the left side of the homepage, and then browse by city and then station. You can hear the latest music, as charted by your local stations. I know that Columbus, OH and Boston, MA are on there.
Item: My current fascination is parsing weather data with ***Perl|http://www.perl.org/***. With a little help from Dirk-Jan Koopman’s ***Geo::TAF|http://search.cpan.org/~djk/Geo-TAF-1.04/TAF.pm*** Perl module, I can now grab ***METAR|http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml*** and ***TAF|http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/taf.shtml*** reports from the ***NOAA|http://www.noaa.gov/***. METAR and TAF are short, coded strings used by weather reporting stations around the world to communicate weather reports in a concise format. For example, a string like this:
ccc|KCMH 091551Z 16008KT 8SM FEW032 SCT250 29/21 A3015
RMK AO2 SLP201 MDT CU W AND VC NW T02940211|ccc
…translates, roughly, to:
qqq|Observed at Columbus, on the 9th at 15:51 Zulu time. Wind is coming from 160 degrees at 8 knots. Visibility is 8 miles. There are few clouds at 3200 feet, and scattered clouds at 25000 feet. The current temperature is 29C, and the current dewpoint is 21C. Altimeter pressure is currently 30.15 inches. Remarks: This is an automated station with a precipitation descriminator. Sea-level pressure is 1020.1 hPa, and there are moderate cumulus clouds to the west and the vicinity of the northwest. The temperature is 29.4C and the dewpoint is 21.1C|qqq
Yowser!
These reports are automatically generated once per hour, or more often if there are notable condition changes.
Eventually I hope to make this into a useful service on the prwdot.org site, but for now, you can check out a couple of links below to see how this works. Keep in mind that I’m still in the experimental stages, so the information may not make a lot of sense. Scroll down to the bottom of the reports to see the information in its most “readable” form:
***METAR for KBVY|http://prwdot.org/cgi-bin/WeatherParser.pl?type=METAR&station=KBVY*** (Current weather conditions for Beverly, MA)
***METAR for KCMH|http://prwdot.org/cgi-bin/WeatherParser.pl?type=METAR&station=KCMH*** (Current weather conditions for Columbus, OH)
I have also done a bit of my own work on the TAF.pm module itself, to allow it to translate measurements into something an American like myself is more comfortable with. TAF.pm’s capacity for processing “remarks” is also somewhat limited, so I am fleshing that out a bit, with some help from ***Jim Metzger|http://hub.kivlin.net/***’s METAR documentation.