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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Pathetic contribution but it makes me happy, and OzWeather updates

Ok so I have been working on my XBMC OzWeather add on.  It now looks like this:


And this:



Yep, live animated BOM radar  and BOM based 7 day forecasts - and I've got a shorthand version to come up when you pause as well.  Apologies for the Gossip Girl in the background....and already those screenshots are out of date, the radar has more overlays (terrain, range etc) and the mini prediction on pause has a bit more info.

I am getting to grips with Python and even coming to like some aspects of it - reminds me of Prolog in that way - I initally hated it but eventually I really came to love it.  There's a definite 'python' way of doing things that, once you know, makes things simple and elegant. Not another giant C like mess like, say, PHP.

As part of this, I submitted a tiny C++ patch - two lines! to the xbmc mainline source code to extend forecast support from 4 to 7 days.  Ridiculous but this makes me inordinately happy somehow - a tiny tiny bit of my code in the ultimate open source project - and in the process I have learned the basics of Git, python, xbmc add ons, googlecode and github.  So a bit of a curve.  Once you get on top of it though (and this is really just the basics), the whole thing seems much easier now, and I am beginning to think about another project.  My father in law has installed solar cells so I thought of some sort of visualiser for that which plots the efficiency of the system both in realtime and historically.  Might be fun?