2022-09-22.01

ForecastAdvisor; Olive.c; wait

ForecastAdvisor

Chances are, if I were to ask you for today's weather forecast you'd turn to stare, zombie-like, into some glowing rectangle and mindlessly repeat whatever's on your favorite weather app or site, never once giving thought to how accurate said report is.

While weather forecasting has come a very long way, and we are blessed with a diverse array of mostly high-quality weather data sources and fancy forecasting models, they still aren't perfect, and often get their educated guesses very wrong.

I'd been a big fan of what used to be a local-to-me forecasting company, Dark Sky. They had clever weather forecast data visualizations that presented what seemed to be pretty good guesses, especially since they were broken down to the hour. I've since switched to the Carrot app, which lets me pick from multiple forecast sources. Making said choice is still pretty much a roll of the dice. That is, until I found ForecastAdvisor. Here's their pitch:

ForecastAdvisor was created by ForecastWatch, another valuable member of the Intellovations family. It is a product for everyone who is interested in the what the weather will be. It answers not only the question "What will the weather be?" by providing the National Weather Service Digital Forecast Database forecast, but also "Who provides the most accurate weather forecast for my city?". It does this in a clean, easy-to-read format not cluttered with graphics and ads. ForecastAdvisor.

The section header provides a sample of what they do, in that it shows not only today's forecast, but the guesses up to today, which begins to help paint a picture of how well we can trust even 3-day forecasts for a given area.

If you scroll down a bit on any given forecast area page, you'll find a table of how the following weather services faired in their guesses on various climate data points:

• The Weather Channel

• Weather Underground

• AccuWeather

• Foreca/Vaisala

• AerisWeather

• NWS Digital Forecast

• Dark Sky

• Wetter

• Weatherbit

• OpenWeather

• Weather News

• World Weather Online

• Persistence

It turns out, that for most areas of the U.S., The Weather Channel, Weather Underground, and AccuWeather are usually the best guessers across most of the climate points. Which is sad, as at least one of them wants badly to take over and privatize NOAA.

So, before you make a decision based on your favorite app and whatever data source it is configured for, perhaps hit up ForecastAdvisor to see just how much you can rely on said information.

Olive.c

We should start by helping you pronounce the topic of this section. Olive.c [GH] is pronounced as "olivets," which is a Ukrainian word for "pencil" ("олівець"). It's a neat name, considering that Olive.c is a small, zero-dependency graphics library designed to draw (render) pixels.

It uses its own memory store, and is crazy stupid fast, even on CPUs (vs GPUs). Whats more, it has a Wasm-compatible toolchain, which means you can bring your compiled creations right into a browser's <canvas>. The link at the top of the section has many neat Wasm-backed demos, and the section header image is a snapshot of a 3D animation, made with Olive.c.

The code is very readable and there are plenty of examples, so go make something beautiful and drop a link back with what you've made.

wait

Photo by Semyon Borisov on Unsplash

I've been hitting a ton of source code repos this year, and whether it be a Makefile, justfile, or some other build system runner, I rarely see use of the wait command. This is a shame, since there are so many cores on modern compute systems, that we should be optimizing our time by running as much as we can in parallel, waiting only when necessary (say, after multiple steps have been completed successfully).

wait is aware of the job table that your fav shell manages for you, and you can wait at the end of an && chain (if the steps are required to be in series) or you can have it wait for all (or specific) & background jobs to complete, review the exit status, and then make a call from there as to how to proceed.

Not seeing wait in build scripts made me wonder if folks weren't aware of it, hence its place in today’s drop. Sure, wait’s cousin sleep has a way better Marketing department, but wait is no less useful, and may help you claw back a few extra seconds/minutes in shell tasks you need to perform.

FIN

(Tomorrow's "weekend project" edition will be a fun one!) ☮