[jonah] Funky weather stations

[Rick Emery]

Quoting "Alan W. Rateliff, II" <lists at rateliff.net>:

> A couple of days ago, weather for Tallahassee, FL is showing up as San
> Diego, CA.  The lag and missing information isn't an issue anymore, just
> wrong weather.
> 
> I just checked and Atlanta, GA shows up as San Diego, also... curious.
> 
> I'm using the 03-01 snapshot of Jonah with the same level Horde.  Time to
> move up?

I'm getting the same thing using CVS HEAD for Sanford, FL. It appears that they
just changed the method of accessing the information on their site.

>From the site (http://weather.interceptvector.com):

"NEW AS OF 03/13/2003 (Database problems)
Like wrote a few days ago, the unscheduled downtime of a few weeks ago was due
to an overload of the server, specifically the database server. I believe I've
tracked a good portion of this load to a database look up that occurs everytime
weather.xml is hit. In my last update to this site, I detailed an update to
weather.xml to help alleviate this problem. It seems that again the database
load has become too high on the server, and my database access has been shut
down. I apologize for the inconvience, but the new method of accessing
weather.xml should work fine. I will be removing the old method (ahead of
schedule) in an effort to get my database access returned, but like I said the
old method is now gone forever, please upgrade to the new method detailed below.
Thank you, and again I offer my apologies."

Basically, the URL used to access the site gets passed an ID now, instead of the
state and city. I have the xml files with the new URLs, but my knowledge and
experience haven't allowed me to figure out an easy way to fix this.

Ideas I've had so far include:

1. Somehow try to update each record in the jonah_weatherstations table to
replace the URLs (would require some kind of scripting).

2. Drop the table, recreate it, and import the new data. This is plausible, if I
can figure out an easy way to convert the XML file to a tab delimited file or
other that will easily import (I use MySQL). This is how the original data got
there (mysqlimport a tab delimited file).

I'm open to suggestions, and am short on free time, so if anybody out there
knows of a way to accomplish this, have at it!

Rick

P.S.

Here are the URLs for the locations you mentioned:

Tallahassee, FL - 
http://weather.interceptvector.com/weather.xml?id=VVNGTDA0Nzk%3D

Atlanta, GA -
http://weather.interceptvector.com/weather.xml?id=VVNHQTAwMjg%3D

If you open the jonah_weatherstations table, find the record for the city/state,
and replace the url there with the one above, you'll get the weather information
you're looking for. This won't fix the overall problem, of course, but it's a
hack that will get you working.

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