Ok, I had my break from coding last night. After having spent some eight months on the same project, I'm looking at some really small ones to scratch little itches i've developed. To be honest, I doubt anybody else would be interested, but I wanted to present the ideas. If people are interested, it means I'll put more work into it, and may affect my choice of languages. ;-)

First, I've been looking for a CLI weather station. This started when I used XFCE4 for a while and it had the neat little weather applet. Now I'm using WMI. I wrote a simple script that uses PyMETAR (http://www.schwarzvogel.de/software-pymetar.shtml) to download weather, and I run this with WMI remote in my status bar. The problem with this solution is that METAR data doesn't seem to be quite as reliable as weather.com data, at least, not in my area. To that end, I found "CurseTheWeather" (http://opensource.hld.ca/trac.cgi/wiki/CurseTheWeather) an ncurses based weather app that includes a weather.com module I can use for the same script.

There's another problem with this solution though, and that is that it doesn't allow me to easily get the forecast. What I want is an app that allows me to get the current weather conditions on the command line, using a formatting string very much like the format of the date command (man date). However, I ALSO want it to provide me with CLI AND GUI options to view a five day forecast. I haven't found any programs that do this. The GUI version is more important to me; I want to have current conditions on my WMI status bar, and have the forecast available in a window at the press of a key.

So I'm planning on writing a script that does all this. If anybody was interested, I'd go the full mile and implement everything I just described. If nobody is interested, I'll probably skip the 'formatted like date' command and do the formatting inside the script and stuff like that.

Depending on whether or not anybody is interested, I will either do this in Python, using the weather.com module from CurseTheWeather, or will do it in Groovy, writing my own Weather.com data parsing unit from scratch. I lose either way, really. I hate doing GUI work in Python. But I also hate working with XML, and weather.com data is in XML; CurseTheWeather has already taken care of messing with the XML.

But I'll probably use Groovy for that unless other people are interested -- if they are, I'm sure most people would be more likely to use a Python app than Groovy one.

My second mini-project is probably about a half hour's work, so lets call it a subcompact mini-project. I've noticed all good text editors allow you to access the console, either directly, or via a plugin that simulates a console within the editor. I think this is kind of dumb, I'd rather use a terminal on the side and not have it run by the editor. Keeps things neater and smaller. The only thing is, I love being able to change to the current buffer's directory. For example, in JEdit, if you use the console plugin, you can type cd ${d} to change to the open buffer's directory. If I use an xterm on the side, I can't do this.

That's what I aim to fix. Here's how I propose to do it: I'll write a JEdit plugin that writes the location of the current file out to $HOME/.currentbuffer or something like that. Then all I have to do is add something like B=$(cat $HOME/.currentbuffer) to my ~/.bashrc, and I can type cd $B any time I want to go to the directory of the current buffer.

So the only hard part is writing a plugin for JEdit. By hard, I mean half hour's work. ;-) Again, NOBODY is interested in this because they don't use JEdit, but I thought it might be interesting to present the idea, since some people might theoretically want to use the same idea with their chosen editor, and it would make sense to settle on a filename (ie: $HOME/.currentbuffer). More importantly, somebody may know that such a mechanism already exists, and can tell me a better way to code it for JEdit. :-)

Dusty