In his following column ( http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050107.html ), he notes:
"Now to last week's column about tsunamis and tsunami warning systems. While my idea may have set many people to work, only a couple of them have been telling me about it. Developer Charles R. Martin and Canadian earth scientist Darren Griffith met through this column, and are in the initial stages of building an Open Tsunami Alerting System (OTAS). Although work has just started, they've established a few basic principles: OTAS will be very lightweight; will use openly available geophysical or seismic data sources; will be highly distributed and decentralized; and will be built to run on very low-powered commodity hardware. They currently foresee using Python and Java, but aren't religious about it. Anyone who wants to help out is welcome and their OTAS blog can be found in this week's links."
See http://otasblog.blogspot.com/
It seems to me that this would be a valuable and feasible type of project for the Python community to get involved in (or perhaps take the lead on). Something the PSF might even consider resourcing to some degree?
Tim C
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