"Jason Bleazard" <dml@bleazard.net> wrote:
: On Fri, November 26, 2004 5:05 pm, jon@dakota-truck.net said:
:>
:> I assume I am on the list already, but if not, Forestville, NY 14062.
: Yep. Do you want to be on the locator map or not, since you're flying
: anyway? I didn't put us on it, because we're insane enough to drive
: anywhere :-).
Good point. As far as the average distance goes, it doesn't
matter to me; since I'm heavily leaning towards flying out I am
game for anywhere in the US (or Canada for that matter) ;-)
: I'll see what I can do about posting the map as it exists so far on the
: weekend. We need more data points!
: If anyone can come up with an automated system that can collect
: coordinates via a web form, append them to a text file, and run a script,
: let me know. I'm using xplanet under Linux, no idea if it's ported
: anyplace else. It's pretty easy to come up with a script that'll generate
: the maps, all I'm missing is some way to get the data points in to the
: text file. Of course, that would require people to look up their own GPS
: coordinates, I wouldn't even know how to automate the lookup process.
Well, its not automated, but I found this:
http://www.zipinfo.com/search/zipcode.htm
Which will convert a zip code into lat/long.
Here's another one: http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer
Let me know if I can be of any help with such a script - I'm not
sure if you are looking to run such a thing on your web site itself,
or on your home PC, or what. Obviously, if you are running it at
home, you'll need a web server there. Might be easier to start out
with a list of zip codes, and names which might be created manually
(collected via e-mail, or an on-line form which would just e-mail
the results to you), then you just run a script which uses that
data to create a text file with the proper lat/long coordinates,
etc. (which I assume is what xplanet uses to create the maps?)
Something like the above probably wouldn't be too bad to write.
I am fairly confident that if you were to provide me with a list
of names and zip codes (or whatever), it wouldn't take very long
for me to write a script which you could run on your linux box at
home that would actually pull the lat/long data off the US Census
Bureau's web site and generate the text file in whatever format
you require to run xplanet on to generate the maps.
Now that I think about it, I might actually be able to automate
the collection of data also, such that whenever somebody inputs
their data, a new text file would be generated, and you might
be able to just pull that down over the web to run the xplanet
program at home.
If you'd like to explore this futher, just shoot me an e-mail
and I'd be glad to work with you on that.
--
-Jon-
.-- Jon Steiger ---- jon@dakota-truck.net or jon@jonsteiger.com --.
| 1970 Barracuda - 1990 Dakota 'vert - 1992 Ram 4x4 - 1996 Dakota |
| 1996 Intruder 1400 - 1996 Kolb FireFly - 2001 Ram QC 3500 CTD |
`------------------------------------ http://www.jonsteiger.com --'
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