Announce: SuperDateTime - Current Date/Temperature and/or Baseball Screensaver

[Drel]

Hello,

Thanks for this useful plugin. This has been the "off" screensaver for months on my Squeezebox, and I love it.

One suggestion -- for those of us with less than perfect eyesight (mine isn't that bad, actually, but I tend to be looking at the display from 12' away or so), could you add a different display mode that includes the time period the weather forecast is for on the larger text line?

Currently, it looks something like this:

Line 1: Tomorrow: Snow - High 34o
Line 2: THESE ARE THE WEATHER CONDITIONS

If I change the display size to the largest mode, I get the information from the second line only:

Line 1: THESE ARE THE WEATHER CONDITIONS

What would be more useful would be to combine the first and second lines on the large display mode:

Line 1: TOMORROW: SNOW - HIGH 34o THESE ARE THE...

Thanks again for this great plugin!

[GoCubs]

One suggestion -- for those of us with less than perfect eyesight (mine isn't that bad, actually, but I tend to be looking at the display from 12' away or so), could you add a different display mode that includes the time period the weather forecast is for on the larger text line?

Thanks for the suggestion. This has been brought up in various forms in the past. In this scenario if you move the text from line 1 to line 2, when would you see the current line 2 text (time/etc)?

-Greg

[crimson]

I don't know if anyone else just had this problem, but weather.com just (temporarily?) stopped listing my zip code causing SuperDateTime to obviously not get any data. I went back and used the city lookup to get my weather.com city code, plugged that in, and am now fine. I'm sure it's just a momentary hiccup, but wanted to post this for anyone. I was getting frustrated thinking it was due to a SlimServer beta update I did. By the way GoCubs, I still love this plugin, hands down the most useful feature that my SB2 has... other than music streaming of course.

[OperaBen]

Sorry if this has been asked. I could not see today's date shown in the short display; nor is there an option to put this parameter. What is the trick here? Thanks.

[GoCubs]

Sorry if this has been asked. I could not see today's date shown in the short display; nor is there an option to put this parameter. What is the trick here? Thanks.

If you hit the up/down arrows you can scroll between short forecasts as well as today's date.

-Greg

[sliph]

Is MLB score streaming broken? It's not working for me for some reason. NBA scores are coming in fine. Perhaps ESPN made a change to their scoreboard this season?

[Steve Baumgarten]

Definitely looks like the MLB parsing needs a tweak. I had a quick look, and ouch, that's some job you have to do to parse the scoreboard page. Have you considered using something like HTML::Parser rather than attempting to pull apart the raw HTML yourself? It does seem a bit fragile as it is, and especially so because you're relying on the HTML to be broken into individual lines (i.e., that newlines will be included at logical intervals in the HTML source) that you then iterate over in your code.

Just taking a quick look at the MLB scoreboard now, I see that all the relevant info is in a single, very long line. My guess is that this is what's confounding the parser. A quick fix might be to add newlines yourself, before iterating over each line -- that way you don't have to worry about epsn.com changing the way it cranks out HTML. (I think switching to HTML::Parser would be better overall, but obviously it would be a lot more work on your part, and I'm reluctant to suggest that given all the work you've already put in on this excellent plugin. It's always so easy to suggest extra work for other people to do, if you know what I mean.)

SBB

[David Zuckerman]

Just installed 4.0.4, and I think I've found a bug.

In 4.0.1, when you press the FF button to cycle through the long forecasts, the three forecast dates are presented in chronological order -- for example, during the day, you see Tonight, then Tomorrow, then Tomorrow Night.

Now, with 4.0.4, pressing the FF button once brings up the second forecast screen... using the example above, Tomorrow pops up first. I have to cycle through manually to get to the forecast for Tonight.

I reverted back to 4.0.1, and the forecast order is back to normal.

Can anyone else reproduce this?

[GoCubs]

Definitely looks like the MLB parsing needs a tweak. I had a quick look, and ouch, that's some job you have to do to parse the scoreboard page. Have you considered using something like HTML::Parser rather than attempting to pull apart the raw HTML yourself? It does seem a bit fragile as it is, and especially so because you're relying on the HTML to be broken into individual lines (i.e., that newlines will be included at logical intervals in the HTML source) that you then iterate over in your code.

Just taking a quick look at the MLB scoreboard now, I see that all the relevant info is in a single, very long line. My guess is that this is what's confounding the parser. A quick fix might be to add newlines yourself, before iterating over each line -- that way you don't have to worry about epsn.com changing the way it cranks out HTML. (I think switching to HTML::Parser would be better overall, but obviously it would be a lot more work on your part, and I'm reluctant to suggest that given all the work you've already put in on this excellent plugin. It's always so easy to suggest extra work for other people to do, if you know what I mean.)

Sorry for the slower than normal response. I'm in the process of moving and haven't had much free time to take a look. I did notice the other day that the Cubs game didn't appear so I assumed the HTML had changed for the new season.

Steve is correct, the score data now appears to be coming in on one single line. Hopefully that's the only change. I believe one of the other sports (NFL?) was similar so I'll have to refresh myself in how I handled it.

Believe it or not, SuperDateTime was my first Perl programming attempt and I didn't expect it to become the monster it has. Had I known I probably would have organized it differently and explored HTML::Parser. Right now I'm comfortable with how everything works and luckily so far the HTML source hasn't changed that much/often.

I'll look into the code and post a fix when I can.

-Greg

[GoCubs]

Just installed 4.0.4, and I think I've found a bug.

In 4.0.1, when you press the FF button to cycle through the long forecasts, the three forecast dates are presented in chronological order -- for example, during the day, you see Tonight, then Tomorrow, then Tomorrow Night.

Now, with 4.0.4, pressing the FF button once brings up the second forecast screen... using the example above, Tomorrow pops up first. I have to cycle through manually to get to the forecast for Tonight.

I reverted back to 4.0.1, and the forecast order is back to normal.

Can anyone else reproduce this?

Does this happen every time? I can't seem to reproduce it.

-Greg