Take the Wrather With You...

If anyone in the maemo world knows of recent plasma packages for the n810, please drop a line or leave a comment linking to it from here.. The post is about Abomination, my perl/KDE4 code to grab and log data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and present it in an interesting way.

I notice that doppler wind is now available from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Also, I didn't notice the up to 512km composite rain maps before. The plan is to include support for both of these radar types into my KDE plasmoiods. I think having the doppler wind as a transparent overlay above the rainfall overlay would be quite telling, being able to see why clouds burst at given points.

Though this doesn't solve the deeper, more interesting question of if the system that is causing the interesting wind trend will remain for the next 2 hours while you are outside performing activity-Y and wanting to remain dry.

Perl io::all, REST, and libferris, wagging the dog

A feature that I've had planned to add to libferris since the UKUUG spring conference earlier this year is Perl io::all support. I've syndicated this because adding an io:all interface to KDE kio stuff would also be very cool IMHO.

I'm digging around for others who think io:all is cool and perhaps that libferris is "plus neutral" and might have some time to help out with the creation of a CPAN module to let the two things work together. In libferris there is a single shot interface to get metadata or file content as a single std::string or an std::iostream based interface allowing seeks, streaming and all that jazz. Ultimately I'd like to make the streaming stuff meet perl::io and also have a fake hash there to allow EA to get read on demand. The C++ and to a fairly large extent the Perl binding side I have knowledge of. But I admit to mostly being a Perl user rather than developer of the language or CPAN modules.

If anyone has pointers to stuff that would help out doing this stuff (tutorials and the like) or would like to support the feature in other ways please drop me a line or comment here. Otherwise, I'll probably dig into this later this year, time permitting.

I'm also thinking about making a REST server for CRUDing libferris. This should make Web clients much simpler to create, for example file managers in Yahoo widget UI. Once again, if this interests you, feel free to jump on in ;-p I'll have a survey of existing REST apis for this sort of stuff, obviously providing a similar interface will help other clients to interface. Luckily I can reuse some of the knowledge I gained when mounting web services as filesystems in the creation of the libferris web service server.