I have included the Blog nickname "SVMOP" (Sailing Vessel Mother of Perl) and the Subtopic name/path in the title of each article so that RSS reader previews can show where the article came from. I only subscribe to three RSS feeds, but until I actually read the article, I don't know where the article is coming from, which by the way, might influence how urgent I might take the posting. Not that I don't love all the stuff I read.. heh, heh!

If anyone finds these article titles obnoxious, let me know.

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I am starting to get a grasp of the difference between XML DOM elements and nodes and their corresponding methods in Python minidom. The configuration XML parsing is done for the time being. Now I'm folding that code back into the previous fields.py code which had use simple space delimited specs. This is much better (using XML) and makes it easy to add new features particularly to output processing.

Tommorow (Thursday) I have some serious tooth extraction and don't expect to be fully functional afterwards (oxycodon). Just in case I try and code in that state, I've checked in versions of everything. I'm still using RCS because I haven't worked out the Subversion client stuff yet.

Hope Kurt is doing fun stuff. I look forward to his return, however, since he has been through all this pyXML stuff many times. This first program, parsing the NOAA files, is fairly trivial in its product, but I'm using it to get myself back in the programming groove.

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Today, I made some major advances on getting the info out of a Python parsed XML file. Hopefully I'll be able to piece it together with the data file parsing code that I wrote last week.

Heavy-duty winter weather is forcast for this next weekend.

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Excuse the acronym, but it will shorten the titles to these notes.

The primary starting point for this project is the NOAA site NCDC: Volunteer Observing Ship Climate Project / Marine Data Home

There are three formats:

The CISL Research Data Archive site looks promising for finding some of the formats, at least through browsing the ASCII versions of the data, or the programs that manipulate it.

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I am planning on using this space to log my software development notes as well as anything else I might have use for. This style and use of blogging has been inspired by Kurt Schwehr's blog.

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I don't know if anyone is still doing any Bloxsom development, but I'm using it because it's Perl, a language I'm familiar with. I have had to hack plugins to get it to do what I want. No problem.

It would have been easier for me to be blogging remotely with WordPress, but that system relies on mysql and the server doesn't have it. Too bad.

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I have made each individual Journal entry so that it has its own RSS feed. If you want to be fed everything, take it from the top "Journal" otherwise, just get it from the individual topic pages.

The previous feed (all) still works.

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