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Well, most of the work is done by Earthdesk and GeekTool 3.

Earthdesk is set to Natural Color, Equirectangular projection, Natural Color, Real Moonlight, centered on Vienna, Background: Starfield. Zoom 80%, Clouds 80%, Brightness 80%.

In GeekTool, the times and the weathers are all separate Shell "geeklets".

Times are generated by running shell commands like

env TZ=Asia/Tokyo date " %l:%M %p"

every 20 seconds

The weather is the tricky part. The way I am doing it now, if I am not careful, gets me throttled for too many concurrent requests to the wunderground.com API server. It also fails badly if I am disconnected, so I will need to do it differently.

FWIW: I have a PHP script which I run as separate Shell Geeklets. I invoke it with the name of the city I want. It then hits wunderground and gets back an XML stream of the local weather, which I parse, format and echo. (the way I'd change this is run the script from cron, with a 30 second wait between requests, and cache the results locally, which I would then call from the Shell Geeklets)

From there it's just a question of setting fonts, sizes, colors and moving the little Geeklet boxes around as you want them.

Threading

We’re quite familiar with the idea of writing a program that follows a specific sequence of steps as outlined in, say, a main() function. A Thread is also a series of steps with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A thread’s sequence, however, can run independently of the main program. In fact, we can launch any number of threads at one time and they will all run concurrently. Visit the Java site for a more involved explanation.

This is incredibly useful when it comes to data mining, as we can have separate threads retrieving different pieces of information from the network. If one gets stuck or has an error, the entire program won’t grind to a halt, since the error only stops that individual thread. To create independent, asynchronous threads, we simply extend the Thread class.

While lxml has some excellent benchmarks about the speed of lxml.etree vs. ElementTree, I wanted to run some tests that were as close as possible to my own use case (fairly simple multi-megabyte XML files).

A quick survey shows that seven of the Alexa U.S. top ten web sites have a SCRIPT tag above their stylesheets or STYLE blocks: AOL, Facebook, Google, Bing, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo!. These web sites don’t currently use @font-face, but if they did, they would experience the IE blocked rendering problem. This raises the concern that other web sites that are early adopters of @font-face have a SCRIPT tag above @font-face and their IE users run the risk of experiencing blocked rendering.

ScriptServer is a minimalist application server, handling both GET and POST requests, including multipart/form-data for file uploads, HTTP redirections, and with an in-memory session management. It can run Python scripts and template files using the standard string substitution format

As data visualization often needs to reach a broad audience the browser is becoming the number one tool to publish and share visualizations. A lot of visualizations require user-interaction to unleash their full potential, thus interactive applets that run directly in the browser are a a great way to analyze the data at hand. Beside the usual suspects like Flash, Silverlight and Processing, JavaScript is quickly gaining ground in the field of interactive visualization embedded in websites. We’ve collected 13 16 JavaScript visualization libraries that help you get started faster, keep it flexible and develop with higher reliability.

Great circles are straight lines that go all the way around the center of the earth. The equator is a great circle. Meridians of longitude that cross over the north and south poles are also great circles. For every location on a great circle, it's antipodal location is also on the circle. Other than the equator itself, any great circle crosses the equator at two antipodal locations, 180° apart. Other than the equator and meridians of longitude that run due north and south, any great circle reaches it's maximum latitudes at two locations that are 90° of longitude east and west of the two locations where the great circle crosses the equator.