Chaucery Blog

A fortnight ago the UN created an Amnesty International approved Human Rights Council.

There was quite widespread support for its creation, but also some notable objectors.

A running gag at the United Nations is that whenever the United States takes a defiant stand against an overwhelming majority of the 191 member states, there are only three countries that predictably vote with Washington most of the time -- whether it is right or dead wrong.

As expected, this incongruous voting pattern was repeated Wednesday when the three loyal U.S. allies -- Israel and the two tiny Pacific Island nations of Palau and the Marshall Islands -- were the only member states to stand in unison with the United States when it rejected a resolution calling for the creation of a new Human Rights Council.

This can be analysed in a number of ways:

The exclusive NewsMax annual feature " United Nations Report Card" reveals that when it comes to supporting the U.S. on key issues, almost every nation in the world body gets a failing grade.

NewsMax examined 12 key General Assembly votes taken on issues of critical importance to the U.S., and found that only four countries -- Israel and the Pacific Ocean nations of Palau, Micronesia and Marshall Islands sided with the U.S. on most of the issues.

The rest of the U.N. members voted against the U.S. position the vast majority of the time, and dozens of countries voted along with America ZERO PERCENT of the time.

Posted by James at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Due to recent oil discoveries, the west central African country of Equatorial Guinea has gone from very poor to very rich in only a few years. I wonder how such a great disparity in wealth with its neighbours, as shown below using figures from the CIA World Factbook, manifests itself in daily life.

Posted by James at 2:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whilst PM John Howard may have problems saying sorry to the Aboriginal people for past injustices, there is no excuse for the continuing under-funding of their medical care. Though many live "inconveniently" far from cities, Australia is a very wealthy country that can and should do more to bring the standard of Aboriginal health care up to that of the general population.

Posted by James at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I built my Weather Guesser using the Services_Weather PEAR PHP module. Although the module can retrieve weather data from CapeScience's GlobalWeather, EJSE, Weather.com and NOAA, only the last of these was suitable for my simple needs. I'll explain why, and describe the other weather APIs that I have found.

• NOAA - the USA's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service provides METAR, or METeorological Aerodrome Reports. The reports are freely available, and cover airports throughout the world. The actual data returned is in a cryptic code, like YPPH 071430Z 10003KT CAVOK 22/14 Q1012, but Services_Weather helpfully translates it into something more user-friendly.
• weather.com - has onerous terms of use, effectively saying that you can use their weather API as long as it is to produce weather pages that look and function identically to the Weather.com site. It even has a term stating that a person's location has to be stored as a permanent user preference unless the user alters it, which makes my application ineligible.
• AccuWeather - I noticed this because it is being used by the Mozilla Firefox weather extension ForecastFox. However, I couldn't find any details of a free API.
• GlobalWeather - this service has disappeared, but an answer in their FAQ promises it will return.
• Yahoo Weather - data is provided by Weather.com, but seems to have much more liberal terms of use than them. The API is really easy to use, requiring just a simple GET, eg. http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=USCA1116, and returning some comprehensive XML. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide an API method of determing the ID for a particular location. For the US zip codes can be used, but for the rest of the world you have to determine the code via a manual search on the Yahoo Weather home page. I suppose this could be screen-scraped, but that really defeats the purpose of an API.
• EJSE - US only, so not investigated.
• WeatherBug - US only, so not investigated.

Posted by James at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The ever expanding Chaucery fun area is proud to announce its newest addition, the Weather Guesser. Unlike most online weather tools, this does not ask where you are located, but attempts to work it out itself.

For most people, this means a tradeoff between accuracy (of getting the location 100% right) and convenience (of having to specify your location). However, occasionally the location may be unknown, for which this tool is a more useful proposition. Memory-impaired backpackers of the world, here's your new homepage.

This is also a good demonstration of the frailties of geolocating computers. I believe that cities are guessed correctly 60% of the time, and countries 95%. Where only the country is known, the weather from a random city in that country is chosen. Specifically, the weather from the nearest major airport to that chosen city is used, as this data is easily and freely available.

If you belong to a large multi-city internet service provider that uses Dynamic IP or a proxy server, then there may be only a weak correlation between IP address and location. In those cases, the Weather Guesser becomes more of a vicarious window on the world.

Posted by James at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)