Month: August 2011

yweather help

In case you want more out of your yweather script when you use it for Geektool, here are some other switches you can use:

I’ve figured out some of it, so I guess my only tip is to not try to use more than one argument at a time (except as shown below with the units example) and therefore to use a bunch of geeklets if you want to show a lot of information.

Also, I believe that ‘weather.png’ in the images folder is the current weather, so you should be able to show it using an image geeklet.

Yahoo Weather Information


Usage:

	./yweather.pl -ct	Displays current temperature

In case you want more out of your yweather script when you use it for Geektool, here are some other switches you can use:

I’ve figured out some of it, so I guess my only tip is to not try to use more than one argument at a time (except as shown below with the units example) and therefore to use a bunch of geeklets if you want to show a lot of information.

Also, I believe that ‘weather.png’ in the images folder is the current weather, so you should be able to show it using an image geeklet.

Yahoo Weather Information

Usage:
	./yweather.pl -ct	Displays current temperature

Arguments:
	-lc 			City
	-lr			Region
	-lt			Country
	-cc			Weather Code (used for images)
	-ct			Current Temperature
	-cw			Current Weather Description
	-cd			Current Date
	-ah			Current Humidity
	-av			Current Visibilty
	-ap			Current Barometric Pressure
	-ar			Change in Barometric Pressure
	-sr			Time of Sunrise
	-ss			Time of Sunset
	-wc			Current Wind Chill
	-wd			Current Wind Direction
	-ws			Current Wind Speed
	-ut			Temperature Unit
	-ud			Distance Unit
	-up			Pressure Unit
	-us			Speed Unit
	-fd1			Today's Day
	-fg1			Today's Date
	-fl1			Today's Low Temp
	-fh1			Today's High Temp
	-ft1			Today's Description
	-fc1			Today's Weather Code
	-fd2			Tomorrow's Day
	-fg2			Tomorrow's Date
	-fl2			Tomorrow's Low Temp
	-fh2			Tomorrow's High Temp
	-ft2			Tomorrow's Description
	-fc2			Tomorrow's Weather Code
	--copyimage		Copy Appropriate Image to Current Image (deprecated)
	--update		Update xml source file

All data is returned without units. To get data with units,
use a combination of commands.

Example: (Displays Current temperature with unit)
	./yweather.pl -ct && ./yweather.pl -ut

http://macenstein.com/default/2009/11/how-to-add-a-bunch-of-useless-stuff-to-your-desktop-with-geektool-yahoo-widgets-and-more/
http://code.google.com/p/yweather/wiki/howtousage

East Grand Forks to add parking–on the Greenway

The city of East Grand Forks, MN is divided on whether to add parking. “Add parking,” you say, “why wouldn’t you want to add parking?” In this case, as reported by the Grand Forks Herald, the additional parking lot would add 32 stalls on the river side of the Boardwalk, a popular downtown collection of restaurants and bars. The problem is that the river side of the existing parking lot (as shown in the image below) is the Greenway, a park/wilderness area created as a buffer from the Red River after the devastating 1997 flood.
 



View Larger Map 

Map centered on proposed parking lot site.

Obviously, many business owners and city council members are excited at the prospect of additional parking because it is (at face value) expected to bring even more people to downtown EGF. (I’ve personally experienced the lack of space on a busy night.)

The mayor said he supports the plan to add parking. He said it is the best thing for the city and he would vote for it with his tiebreaking vote if the city council was deadlocked. Mayor Stauss said his support for the plan is not influenced by his brother and son owning the Boardwalk building.

Some owners, however, are seeing the long-term consequences. 

Dave Homstad, the co-owner and general manager of the Blue Moose Bar & Grill, says he spent an extra $80,000 to $100,000 to build his exterior deck to a height high enough to provide a view of the river and the Greenway, and the new parking lot would block that view for his customers. “If they extend that parking lot out there it’s going to take away my view of the river,” he said

Additional parking is available across DeMers Avenue in the Cabela’s parking lot, in other lots and streets near downtown, and across the Red River in downtown Grand Forks, ND. Why another lot, and why here?

Wanted (and some found): Geologic maps (formation contacts) of South America countries, for use in GIS

Here’s a good ol’ plea for help from the scientific community. As my questions to “the scientific community” via Academia.edu have gone unnoticed, I’m posting this out here to see if anyone else searching for the same thing has had any luck. I’m building a GIS (geographic information system) model to determine the possible biogeographic districbution of a genus through time. What I need for this, since the fossils are from South America, is a good geologic map, either of most of the continent or of the countries of Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru. Hunting around online hasn’t shown me anything that I want to shell out a bunch of money for, site unseen, and I’m honestly trying to avoid having to scan paper maps and register them (additionally, I haven’t been able to access our worldwide collection of paper geologic maps recently). 1:500,000 or 1:100,000 would be great, but I’d even take 1:1,000,000 at this point. I need something with formational contacts so I can plot possible distributions. So that’s the challenge of the day: have any geologists in South America discovered a good source for this type of material? Would you be willing to share or trade? Drop me an email at one of the addresses on the right sidebar if you can help.

Brazil

UPDATE 2011-08-15: I found (finally) an online version of the Geological Map of Brazil at 1:1,000,000 scale. Unfortunately it is only available in a viewer, broken up into small sections. Anyone know where I can download the full dataset, or at least that data for those sections? UPDATE 2011-08-15 1431: Thanks to Sidney Goveia over at Geosaber, I tracked down the Brazil data to Geobank, so here goes nothing! If you are using a Mac, make sure you extract the contents of the ZIP files using StuffIt Expander (if you have it) rather than Archive Utility, otherwise you don’t end up with a folder.

Peru

UPDATE 2011-08-16: You can download a formation-level geological map of Peru at the 1:1,000,000 scale from INGEMMET – the Instituto Geologico Minero Y Metalurgico. There are a few steps through the online viewer (note: this is the new viewer, so the following steps may not work the same), which may appear in Spanish at first but for some reason decided to reload partway through in English. If you want, you can try to figure out how to turn on the layer under the Map–>Geodatabase menu, but really when that menu comes up you want to click the Download/Descargas folder icon, then select the Geologia layer (SHP icon next to it). It also looks like you can download the data as a KML file for Google Earth. A structural layer (Dominios Estructurales) also looks available, and I checked out the radiometric date layer (Dataciones Radiometricas) as well, which could be useful. You might need to check the projection on the geologic map once you download it. I imported it to QGIS at first and it came up as WGS 84 (probably because of the existing project), but I dug around and figured out that it works as PSAD_1956_UTM_Zone_18S. Need a map key for formation symbols? You can download scans of the paper version of this map from here, one of which has the legend. If the correct map doesn’t come up at that link, click on “Ministerio de Energia y Minas. Instituto de Geologia y Mineria” so see the others. The symbology is different. An alternative large-scale (1:100,000) but low-quality set of maps is available here but will not easily go into GIS.

Wanted: Geologic maps (formation contacts) of South America countries, ideally for use in GIS

Here’s a good ol’ plea for help from the scientific community. As my questions to “the scientific community” via Academia.edu have gone unnoticed, I’m posting this out here to see if anyone else searching for the same thing has had any luck. [Since then, I’ve discovered ResearchGate, which I generally like better for questions like this. 2014-03-05]

I’m building a GIS (geographic information system) model to determine the possible biogeographic districbution of a genus through time. What I need for this, since the fossils are from South America, is a good geologic map, either of most of the continent or of the countries of Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru. Hunting around online hasn’t shown me anything that I want to shell out a bunch of money for, site unseen, and I’m honestly trying to avoid having to scan paper maps and register them (additionally, I haven’t been able to access our worldwide collection of paper geologic maps recently).

1:500,000 or 1:100,000 would be great, but I’d even take 1:1,000,000 at this point. I need something with formational contacts so I can plot possible distributions.

So that’s the challenge of the day: have any geologists in South America discovered a good source for this type of material? Would you be willing to share or trade?