get_weather_from_google broken?

[defaria]

For quite some time now the indicator-weather applet in Ubuntu has been unable to do a Forecast. When I do it I get: "Forecast information cannot be fetched. Connection cannot be established".

I noticed that indicator-weather was written in Python and I decided to see what all the fuss was about Python (I'm a huge Perl guy but never saw a good reason to learn Python). I wanted to specifically learn the debugger so I said "Hey indicator-weather has this bug - let's see if I can debug it).

At around line 472 of indicator-weather.py it makes the following call:

self.forecast = pywapi.get_weather_from_google (location_name, hl = self.locale)

And I see in pywapi.py that it's using the GOOGLE_WEATHER_URL of http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=%s&hl=%s. The %s's are filled in with ",,,32847270,-117274204" and "en". This call fails. If I use a browser to go to that URL with the %s's filled in I get:

We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
Google Help for more information

And going to the Google Help page talks about captcha's and the like. Is this just plain broken now?

[tgalati4]

Sending automated queries violates Google's terms of service. The weather query is picked up by their robot filters.

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012...-disconnected/

[defaria]

OK, it says it can use Yahoo too and in fact I'm set to use Yahoo but that doesn't seem to be working either. In any event, how do we get this fixed?

[tgalati4]

Check http://bugs.launchpad.net. I found 168 hits for indicator-weather. And the API's constantly change for such services: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...r/+bug/1048193

When the service dies, there is not much you can do about it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...r/+bug/1047898

[Linuxisfast]

Add atareo ppa and install my-weather-indicator which is far more feature filled and bug free and it has several options of weather service including weather world weather and wunderground.

[defaria]

The fact that there's been 168 hits for bugs and at least a year and nothing's been fixed is very telling... From what I can tell both the Google and the Yahoo services are not working.

[defaria]

Care to tell me how to "add atareo ppa"?

[defaria]

So I go to http://www.noobslab.com/2013/01/inst...in-ubuntu.html and install my-weather-indicator and nothing happens. How do you run the thing? I look at the list of installed files and I assume it's something like:

$ /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/bin/my-weather-indicator
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/bin/my-weather-indicator", line 38, in <module>
import comun
File "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/my-weather-indicator/share/my-weather-indicator/comun.py", line 121, in <module>
line = f.readline()
File "/usr/lib/python3.3/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
return codecs.ascii_decode(input, self.errors)[0]
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 512: ordinal not in range(128)

Bug free? Really?