Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Earthquake alert script

I was always interested in earthquakes and weather phenomena. I guess the earthquakes because I come from Greece, a country that has earthquakes very frequently. I was constantly looking for an earthquake alert script in Linux, but I haven't found something interesting. I have tried eQuake for Firefox, but I was not impressed, mostly because I don't want to rely on the browser to get an alert.
I made a small script using Python that reads an RSS feed from the Automatic GEOFON Global Seismic Monitor. You can customize the information you want to get in your feed, by setting some parameters like longitude and latitude, as shown in the example. The values for these parameters are stored in a text file that you can change easily.
The script is released under GNU/GPL 2.0 or later, so feel free to use, change and distribute. If you have any good ideas on making the script more user friendly let me know. In my todo list I have the creation of a GUI to change the values of the configuration file, and a notification area icon to notify about new events.
You can download the script from my homepage.

Edit (22/07/08): You can now find downloads and source code for earthquakeAlert at google code.

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