04e5caae2d
Since NWS alerts and forecasts list their expiration times relative to the issuing office's local timezone, filtering for expired documents relative to the users timezone can lead to them being filtered early when they're not both coincidentally the same. Introduce a one day (86400 second) offset buffer as a simple workaround for now, since the user's and issuing authority's timezones shouldn't ever differ by more than that. This has a downside of showing forecasts or alerts which have expired and not been replaced, but that was possible already if timezones differed in the other direction, and is preferable to the alternative. The NWS DBX schema for WX weather zones does include a field for a timezone code, so a future change may introduce more accurate calculations in order to identify the relative offset between the user and issuer, but this will require extending our own zones format to add a new value for it.
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General Information About the Weather Utility
===============================================
:Copyright: (c) 2006-2012 Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>. Permission
to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software is
granted under terms provided in the LICENSE file distributed
with this software.
.. contents::
What?
-----
This command-line utility is intended to provide quick access to current
weather conditions and forecasts. Presently, it is capable of returning
data for localities throughout the USA and some select locations
globally by retrieving and formatting decoded METARs (Meteorological
Aerodrome Reports) from NOAA (the USA National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration) and forecasts/alerts from NWS (the USA National Weather
Service). The tool is written to function in the same spirit as other
command-line informational utilities like cal(1), calendar(1) and
dict(1). It retrieves arbitrary weather data via precompiled
correlations or custom-tailored aliases (system-wide or on a per-user
basis). It can be freely used and redistributed under the terms of a
BSD-like License.
Why?
----
My girlfriend had a long commute to/from work and school, and often
wanted to check the weather both for home and her office. Unfortunately,
starting a Web browser, pulling up a weather site, entering multiple ZIP
codes and waiting for them to load is time-consuming for the
marginally-impatient. Since she tended to stay logged into a shell
server most of the time, I figured I'd install a quick command-line tool
to retrieve weather info for her commute. To my surprise, a quick search
turned up little that met my basic requirements:
* retrieve current data on-demand
* provide both current conditions and short-term forecasts
* simple, human-readable output
* easy to configure and use
* flexible command-line switches and options
Where?
------
A tarball for the most recent version of the weather utility can be had
here:
* http://fungi.yuggoth.org/weather/src/
Alternatively, Debian and Ubuntu users can install the weather-util
package from any mirror.