New faces application: iconic weather forecasts

Steve Kinzler (kinzler@cs.indiana.edu)
Mon, 15 Feb 1993 14:52:58 -0500

To faces@stard.eng.sun.com,weather-users@zorch.sf-bay.org in mail:

I've recently completed a new applications for "faces" -- iconic weather
forecasts. It's available in the cs.indiana.edu faces archive. To try
it out, you'll need:

pub/faces/scripts.tar.Z the "wx" and "wx.faces" files therein
pub/faces/weather.tar.Z the bitmap database for this application

scripts.tar.Z also contains a revised "faces" front-end script that
implements this application as "faces -W [ <city-code> ]". Without this
script, you'll need to run it with something like:

faces -f /usr/local/faces/weather -p 1800
-e '/usr/local/faces/bin/wx.faces [ <city_code> ]'

with paths adjusted appropriately, of course. And "wx" has to be
installed in your executables path. The "wx.faces" script can be
reconfigured at the top for the location of perl on your system, the
default city code and the weather command to use ("wx" is the default,
but other such weather programs are available and suitable).

"wx -st <2-letter-state-abbrev>" will lists that state's city codes.
Internet access is necessary.

Since the bitmaps to display are determined from heuristic pattern
matching on the textual output of "wx", their selection is not always
100% correct. If anyone identifies a case where it fails, feel free to
forward the offending "wx" output to me and I'll attempt to account for
it in future revisions of this script. Also welcome are better and
additional bitmaps for the weather database.

=========================================================================
|| Note to weather-users readers:
||
|| Faces is a window-based tool for visually monitoring lists with icons.
|| Typically, it is used to monitor mail, print queues or users on a
|| system. It contains graphical interfaces for NeWS, SunView, XView and
|| X11. The development of faces is led by Rich Burridge
|| (richb@stard.eng.sun.com). Source code for faces is available in
|| cs.indiana.edu anonymous ftp, file pub/faces/faces.tar.Z with other
|| related items in that directory.
=========================================================================

Enjoy, Steve Kinzler
kinzler@cs.indiana.edu