Acting on a challenge issued by a well-known US technology columnist two UTS students have developed a tsunami warning program for use on personal computers.

In the days following the Asian tsunami disaster the tech guru who writes under the name Robert X. Cringely proposed that individuals didn't need to wait for a multi-government warning system to be developed. According to Cringely some of the necessary data was already freely available on the internet and a PC could do the processing - it just needed someone to develop an application.

After seeing the Cringely piece online UTS Information Technology student Christian Kent realised he had already seen a website that provided some basic global analysis - and it had telegraphed the Boxing Day tsunami. He told Engineering student Marcus Schappi and they decided to put the idea to the test.

After one night's work the two members of the UTS Programmers Society had a first version up and running and ready to show Cringely.

"He was really happy," Schappi said. "Then he tore it to shreds and told us how to fix it up."

The students' "Tsunami Warning Widget" draws on and processes tsunami warning bulletins issued online by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The program automatically checks each minute for tsunami bulletins and will generate a pop-up warning screen if new information is received, locating an undersea earthquake on a map and giving its precise time, location and magnitude.

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's warning system is centred on the Pacific region, but it has been issuing bulletins on the Indian Ocean activity," Schappi said.

While not providing an alert for the precise coastlines at risk, the program does point out the epicentre graphically. "We have been able to prove the effectiveness of our application using the archive of bulletins issued over the past few weeks," Schappi said.

For the technically minded, the tsunami warning application is built around freely-available software called Konfabulator.

"Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to," Kent said. "Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, will fetch the latest stock quotes and even give your current local weather."

The main task for the pair was working out how to automatically convert plain text tsunami warning bulletins into an "RSS feed" that could be used by Konfabulator to generate the warning window.

The results are available for download. The Tsunami Warning Widget runs on both Windows XP or 2000 and MacOS X operating systems. It requires Konfabulator, a download link for which is on the Warning Widget page.