Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!apple!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!kline
From: kline@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Charley Kline)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Network Temperature Protocol
Message-ID: <1990Jul27.153441.19652@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 27 Jul 90 15:34:41 GMT
References: <9007261810.aa20901@huey.udel.edu>
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 40

Mills@udel.edu writes:
>With all that horsepower you still struggle with WMO format? Zillions of
>five-digit encoded obscurities? Surely a wee finite-state autonmaton such
>as tinkered by one of my students can relieve that tension.

Oh lord no. I meant I struggled with the various categorization of
products by their WMO headers, some of which encapsulate an entire
product, others signify a set of products to follow, each of which to
be separated by ASCII RS characters, some have several products
separated by "zone codes" which seem to differ in syntax depending on
who is typing them in, and so on.

The kinds of things I parse are the SA observations, which I tried
writing a yacc grammar for but it was so full of ambiguities it wasn't
funny. My student wrote a chunk of code to convert them into little
data structures, which works fairly nicely. I also decode the Weather
Watch announcements, which are fixed-format enough that a perl program
can take a stab at pattern-matching them down to something useful.

>Taking this
>issue seriously, I personally eyeballed a PDP11/40 at Heathrow Airport
>near London which tapped those digits from the weather wire and produced
>a quite respectable English rendition suitable for automatic broadcast
>by regions throughout the country. One of my radios has a feature that
>announces its frequency in English. Strongly Japanese-accented English.

I'm trying to talk management here into a DECtalk box. Although the
geewhiz of talking computers has kind of lost its appeal these days;
everyone wants to see, not hear.  Another argument for the no-code
license, I guess.

Personal for Dave: What kind of radio is this? My latest acquisition is
an Icom IC-24AT, which doesn't speak but has that strongly Japanese
flavor nonetheless. For example in the manual. I love it for its size,
but the damn puts out five watts on high power, which is enough to get
the combination heat sink/belt clip hot enough to burn my hip.

_____________________________________________________________________________
Charley Kline, KB9FFK/KT, PP-ASEL                            c-kline@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois Computing Services                      (217) 333-3339