Re: [jdev] Re: weather data over Jabber

On Sat, 8 Jan 2005 23:26, Tijl Houtbeckers wrote:
> Heh, you're gonna write a weather bot that describes the current weather?
> It's fine by me you know, you can do it with this XML file I'm sure, but
> some people might find it usefull to be able to give predictions about the
> weather as well. You only need to retrieve the file once.. some user might
> want a 3 day forecast, some might want to know about this evening, etc.

What is your objection to using other means for getting data for other days?  
Why can't three different forecasts be three different pubsub items?  Or 
shall we just throw that feature of pubsub out of the window and go for 
single, gigantic documents for everything in Jabber which uses pubsub?

> Because that would suit your needs, not someone else their needs. And if
> they would just suit their needs, they wouldn't suit your needs. Sure they
> could have split it up in different files and what not, maybe they have
> (did you look around?), maybe they will, maybe they won't. It's their job
> to provide weather data. The file is still very small, and if you care
> about file size maybe you should be parsing their own custum binary format
> rather than XML.

I only care about file size because I don't want to spam a whole week of 
weather data down an IM channel every half an hour.  It's more than 
sufficient to require people to (a) remember the older data, or (b) make 
subsequent requests for the older data.

> The claims were that this file was filled with rubbish and not human
> readable. But actually, it's quite human readable (since I'm human, and
> could read it and understand it in 1 go without any documentation
> whatsoever), and there is little, if any rubbish in there.  Might be a few
> things you don't *understand* in there, doesn't mean they are useless to
> others (in particular, those who read documentation).

> While we're at it, the way they use it much MORE human readable than what
> you propose. 48 what?

Perhaps you missed the part of my email where I mentioned standardising the 
units.  Make it whatever unit the majority of people will use (in this case, 
Celsius) and everyone else can translate it to whatever they want.

> That "small" minority happens to be the people who pay them to do their
> work. And the SI standard for temperature is Kelvin not Celcius.

I know that, but the majority of people don't use it, do they...

Personally, though, I would have no objection to using SI units.  Might as 
well use metres for rainfall as well, while you're at it.

> It's like I would give you a free dinner, and you'd complain that
> there's carrots on the menu (you don't even LIKE carrots)

Funny thing is... if you did do that, I _would_ complain.  Hell, I _really_ 
don't like carrots.  So it's a good analogy.

> > P.S. You don't need to send a copy to me and the list.  I don't need to
> > receive the email twice.

> Well, then you shouldn't have added a reply-to: header with your address
> in it to your email. In case you don't know that means "send a reply to
> this address".

It's still considered bad form to send doubles in the case of mailing lists.  
I'm on the mailing list, sending a separate copy to me isn't helping 
anything...

TX

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             Email: Trejkaz Xaoza <trejkaz@trypticon.org>
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