xfce4-weather-plugin stopped working with "Invalid License Key"

[Guido Berhoerster]

* Greg Folkert <greg at gregfolkert.net> [2011-11-06 00:38]:
> On Sat, 2011-11-05 at 18:43 +0100, Guido Berhoerster wrote: 
> > * Greg Folkert <greg at gregfolkert.net> [2011-11-05 16:58]:
> > > On Fri, 2011-11-04 at 23:15 +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote: 
> > > > On ven., 2011-11-04 at 23:05 +0100, Christof Meerwald wrote:
> > > > > Hi,
> > > > > 
> > > > > just noticed that the xfce4-weather-plugin stopped working for me - in
> > > > > the HTTP response I can see "Invalid License Key"...
> > > > > 
> > > > > 
> > > > See http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/goodies-dev/2011-October/003139.html
> > > 
> > > What is "Weather report" (aka gweather) doing differently that xfce4
> > > plugin is not doing?
> > 
> > If you are referring to the GNOME's libgweather, it uses several
> > different sources (www.bom.gov.au, www.weather.gov,
> > weather.noaa.gov, www.metoffice.gov.uk), see the code available
> > at http://git.gnome.org/browse/libgweather/
> 
> Its also contacting (at least for the US) weather.com, in fact the Radar
> Images are from there as well.
> 
> Line 91 of:
> 
> http://git.gnome.org/browse/libgweather/tree/libgweather/weather-wx.c
> 
> Shows its also using "image.weather.com" and is variablized
> 
> To get something like:
> http://image.weather.com/web/radar/us_mkg_closeradar_medium_usen.jpg
> 
> Its gets forecasts from:
> Australian Bureau of Meteorology forecast source (variablized)
> http://www.bom.gov.au/fwo/%s.txt
> 
> US National Weather Service IWIN forecast source (variablized) 
> http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/sample_products/browser_interface/ndfdBrowserClientByDay.php?&lat=%.02f&lon=%.02f&format=24+hourly&startDate=%04d-%02d-%02d&numDays=7
> 
> UK Met Office forecast source (variablized) 
> http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/%s/%s_forecast_weather_noscript.html
> 
> 
> So... I guess its not using Weather.com for anything except the Radar
> Image.
> 
> Since these are publicly funded entities (except for weather.com), could
> it be done similarly?

Yes, the TOS are all on their websites:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/legal/tandc#Weather-gadgets-and-RSS-feeds
(must display a link back to their website)

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/disclaimer.php
(public domain)

http://www.bom.gov.au/other/copyright.shtml
(attribution and copyright statement, disclaimer, link back to
their website)

Direct use of ligweather is probably not feasible since it uses
gconf, but the parsing code could probably be extracted.
So there are enough free sources available, what matters is
somebody stepping up and doing the work, otherwise this
discussion is pretty much pointless.
-- 
Guido Berhoerster