It's amazing the kind of sociopathy one can rationalize by saying, "That's what corporations do."

First they ignore you, (IE6, "What other browsers?")
then they laugh at you, (IE7, "LOL we got your tabs right here")
then they fight you, <-----(You are here)
then you win.

No. No, they weren't.

Did you miss the "Free data" link on the website http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/mpp/freedata.html? NCDC tries to limit the charging of "$$$$" to only commercial and private entities in order to help offset the enormous cost of ingesting, archiving, and processing one of the world's largest datasets; we're not fully funded by Congress.

Charging for data is a touchy subject around here, though--the scientists, developers, customer service people, and management would all love to give away as much of our data as possible (and we give away a lot of it), but the money is always an issue.

I Groovy'd it:

println str.tokenize().collect({(char) Integer.parseInt(it, 16)})

Not as good (it returns a list), but quick...

Here is a writable closure for some KML:

def kmlDocument = new groovy.xml.StreamingMarkupBuilder().bind{
    mkp.xmlDeclaration()
    mkp.declareNamespace('': 'http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2')
kml{
Document{
    Folder{
        name('*** stations')
        description('http://some.place.on.teh.webs/qry')
        open('1')
        stationTypes.each({type ->
            Folder{
                name(type[0])
                description('Station Type: ' + type[0])
                type[1].each({platform ->
                    Folder{
                        name(platform)
                        description('Platform: ' + platform)
                        stations[type[0] + platform].each({station ->
                            Placemark{
                                name(station.name)
                                description('http://some.place.on.teh.webs/qry/station?idtypeabbr=stnid&idvalue=' + station.stnidnum)
                                styleUrl(station.getIcon())
                                Point{
                                    coordinates(station.coord)
                                }
}})}})}})}}}} //lameness filter ate my whitespace; doesn't look like LISP in real life
def f = new File('doc.kml')
f.delete()
f << kmlDocument

The cool thing is that I get all this plus seamless Java integration (i.e. every class in the standard library -- GregorianCalendar, for instance), all my Java tools work, and I can replace lots and lots of boilerplate Java code with one and two liners of Groovy.  So:

ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
list.add("Blah");
list.add("Blah");
list.add("Blah");
list.add("Blah");
System.out.println(list);

Becomes:

def list = ["Blah","Blah","Blah","Blah"]
println list

And hey, with closures, if you want to do something like capitalize the first character of each string in that list it's really easy:

println list.collect({
    it[0].toUpperCase() + it[1..it.length() - 1] //there's a better way to do this; I'm being pedantic
})

Which is not to say that Python couldn't do all that, but Groovy makes life for Java monkeys much easier.

Yet