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Localising Weather Applications
There are a number of weather related applictions for the Linux desktop. Most
of these lookup up weather data from airport meteorological stations. These
stations are identified by an international 4 character abbreviation. These
applcications use this to lookup the corect watehr information.
Applications
gweather
evolution
kweather
Problems
In Evolution there is a problem in that location names are not localisable.
This bug [http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89746] refers to this problem.
Where do you get the data
More pressing then the localisability is the fact that many localitions
are missing for countries. The data is easily retreived. Use the following
URLs to identify weather stations in yor country and locations.
You may have to correct a few where names have changed eg airport names or to
reflect to a normal user not an aeroplane pilot where this site is located.
This is a good listing of sites sorted by country
https://www.notams.jcs.mil/common/icao/index.html
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/oso/site.shtml
Contains downloadbale ASCII version and instructions on obtaining hardcopy
versions - downloadable version seems to be missing
http://www.wapf.com/world/FALA.html
Produces nice maps and proximity to other stations to help you identify the
location.
http://www.partow.net/miscellaneous/airportdatabase/
A database representation of the ICAO codes.
http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml
You can retreive data from multipl stations. Usefull to check whether the ICAO
code is valid for weather data.
http://weather.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/mgetmetar.pl?cccc=FAJS
The actual URL used by gweather to retreive weather data.
Please also check the data of the weather, it might be so out of date that it
is not valid.
Evolution Locations File
/usr/share/evolution/1.4/Locations
Create a country definition and ensure it is included under your region. Add
locations into your region file.
GWeather
This email explains what needs to be done to localise gweather so that it has
the right names for locations in your locale.
From: Davyd Madeley
To: gnome-love@gnome.org, gnome-i18n@gnome.org
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 03:10:04 +0800
Subject: GNOME Lovers Needed: l10n work for locations database
gweather ships a very comprehensive locations database. GNOME-Applets
2.9.2 has some 3000+ more locations to this database[1] from syncing
with the latest METAR list, but now we need your help.
The database now has support for tags (as well as ,
and ). While region, country, and state are all easy to
work out, city tags are hard, it's easy to figure out what locations are
in a city (sometimes) but not what their local names are. As a result,
many names are things like "Location 1" or "My Location (alternate)".
This is where you come in, spread around the world, and having a good
knowledge of local, state and maybe even national geography, you will be
able to clean up the locations file for your area.
How do you do this?
1) Check out the latest version of Locations.xml.in [2]
2) Fix up your area, the format for the XML file should be fairly
evident, or you can consult the DTD [3].
3) Use xmllint and the DTD to check that the file structure is still
sane.
4) File a bug in bugzilla under the gweather component of
gnome-applets. Give it the subject, "Locations Love - $my_area". Attach
a context diff of the Locations.xml.in file.
If you're a new contributor to GNOME, this is a really good way to get
yourself in the Changelog and NEWS file. This type of bread and butter
work is really easy, and you don't even have to build any software to do
it ;)
Remember that all strings in the Locations.xml.in file should be in the
C locale (US english). This means that locations should use their
American names or anglicized names. Otherwise use the local name. If you
use an anglicized name, add a comment to the XML so that translators
know about the local name.
I would really like this done as soon as possible so that translators
can get to work on getting the translations for the database up to
scratch. I want to have a really rocking locations database ready for
GNOME 2.10 (and eventually weather.gnome.org).
Also, maintaining the locations database has been proving to be an
increasingly time consuming task for me. If you feel you might be up to
scratch at maintaining this database, drop me a line, I could do with
some help.
Happy Hacking,
--davyd
[1] a log showing new locations/changed locations and removals is here:
http://oracle.bridgewayconsulting.com.au/~davyd/misc/locations_changes.log
[2] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/gnome-applets/gweather/Location=
s.xml.in
[3] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/gnome-applets/gweather/location=
s.dtd
--=20
Davyd Madeley http://www.davyd.id.au/