The cool desktop continues to grow

By this point, I have progressed the cool desktop project into, well, I don’t know what. It’s getting larger all the time. I feel like I did when we remodeled the house. Of course, we only started to remodel a couple of bathrooms, but then it just sort of kept on going. Anyway,…

I’ve got a bunch of things working now – earthquakes, storms, volcanoes, satellites – all of these come via Michael Dear at Wizabit; his Totalmarker project is just a godsend. I’ve added some other scripts, tracking sea turtles in the Pacific, etc. One of my favorite sub-projects has been the fire data.

The University of Maryland obtains and processes IR data from one of the overhead satellites and makes it available for ftp download. I wasn’t very good at Perl (well, I’m still not good at Perl) so I wrote a batch file script that downloads the data via ftp. It was a little more complicated than that – you have to navigate to the right directory and find the correct file by name, so you have to build all that information in advance. After downloading, I process it according to temperature and build a marker file; all that’s in Perl. But it looks pretty cool.

The next project is to grab the data about Cruise Ships and their locations. I’ve got the Perl script for the web page scraping working so far; now to build up the database sections and the reformating. I could probably do this better in regex and so I’ll have to look into building that skill.

I would not have been able to get this far without the good people at www.perlmonks.org. The Perl Monks have been very generous with their time and wisdom and for that, I thank them.

Pictures to come soon.