The OpenWeatherMap API has been making the rounds. It practically came out of nowhere with a simple and open way to access weather data. This inspired me to write a tool that spits out a single, simple line describing the current weather at a location.

I decided to revisit Python for this tool. I'll probably use Python as my obligatory second language in implementing a reference app for my task management framework, so I figured it'd be good to brush up on the pythonic way of doing things.

The task management app is almost a cliché at this point. I still consider it an unsolved problem, at least for myself. My requirements are probably peculiar. I'm looking for an elegant task-management framework more than a consumer-friendly application. This is a perfect scenario to try to tackle the problem myself.

I'll go into details once I start working through each component of planning and writing this thing. Here's a very high-level overview of what I'd like to accomplish:

  1. Simplicity in design and implementation
  2. A command-line app that I can use daily for work and personal task management
  3. A serialization format that is straightforward and easy to work with
  4. Extensible

The Internet

It's 1996, and after a few short years of the "World Wide Web" fad, things have begun to settle down. This Internet thing has really changed the game.

I've only got a few minutes on the modem before I'm inevitably kicked off, but my news reader pulls down articles for all the top headlines for the past three days in just a couple of minutes. It's all text, but I can see how multimedia might be added to news feeds in the future. Well, I'm good to go! I have all my reading material right here, full to the brim with content, and I can get on with my day. I can even load a few of these up to my PDA.

Hurricane Sandy (colloquially known as "Frankenstorm") is going strong in the Atlantic. It is expected to make landfall somewhere between Delaware and New York late Monday or early Tuesday.

To visualize and record this event, I'm fetching weather data from Weather Underground for the Atlantic City/Galloway Township area and plugging it into a powerful graphing library. The data began around 3 PM today and will continue recording until the event is over.

Apple's iPhone 5 was released this week. It lived up to most of the speculation, including a 4-inch Retina display and mostly-aluminum construction. I'm probably in the minority here, but the two-tone throwback to the original iPhone just isn't my thing. If I were to upgrade, I would probably opt for the white variant simply because the white/silver combination is more pleasing than the black/slate.