Re: Christmas Wish Lists

["John C. Peterson" <jaypee@netcom.com>]

On Thu, Dec 02, 1999 at 03:08:51PM -0800, Jerome Kaidor wrote:
> > 
> >    With the holidays coming up, I thought it might be fun for people to
> > post thier Christmas "wish lists". No, I don't mean that new GPS unit or
> > whatever, I mean in terms of aviation software for Linux. [...snip...]
> > 
> *** How about a standardized API for doing DUATS-type stuff, e.g., getting
> weather reports and filing flight plans?  I've seen at least one TCL script
> for doing this, but DUATS alas changes their format occasionally - such 
> scripts are always out of date.  Also, there are at least two different
> DUATS services.
> 
>    Such an API/"driver" could be a nice building block towards creating
> industrial-strength flight planning S/W.
> 

   I'm interested in this problem as well, and have even already
experimented with some possible approaches. Here's a few ramblings
that come to mind;

   Now that DUATS finally has a web interface, the whole problem more
or less reduces to one of fetching web pages, and extracting selected
information of interest. This problem is one of general interest to a
broad spectrum of people (e.g. snatching stock quotes from multiple
web pages and writing them to a file). I've found several free
software packages for doing these kinds of things. Some do a better
job than others when it comes to addressing the "change of format
problem" you mentioned. I dont have all my notes handy, but here are
a few examples;

	WebL
	  http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/WebL/

	Webpluck
	  http://www.edsgarage.com/projects/webpluck/

	NoDose
	  http://www.cs.nwu.edu/~adelberg/nodose/nodose.html

I've played some with the aviation weather observations and forecasts
that NOAA/NWS provides over the web, and found them to be fairly easy
to work with.  I've already written some crude shell scripts that I
run regularly out of my crontab. They fetch pages with "lynx -dump",
and then extract the desired data with "gawk".  Writing "robot
software" to interface with DUATS will be a bit trickier since
cookies are being used to identify who you are. (And no passwd
security I might add, Jeez!)

   Any other Xmas wishes??? Only 9 days until Santa comes :^)

Later, John

-- 
 ___|___  | John C. Peterson, KD6EKQ | Installing Micro$oft Windows on a PC is
  -(*)-   | mailto:jaypee@netcom.com | like putting wagon wheels on a Porsche!
  o/ \o   | San Diego, CA   U.S.A    | See http://www.linux.org/ for info.
-
Archives of linux-aviation: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/linux-aviation/
To unsubscribe: send the command "unsubscribe linux-aviation" in the body
of a mail message to <Majordomo@mail.nl.linux.org>.