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Tiny Geo Coder

Tiny Geo-coder | The fastest way to find latitude and longitude

When I created a Garmin POI file with all the Yamaha dealers in the US (and a separate file for Canada), I needed a way to convert a street address (or even just a city name) into latitude and longitude.

At the time, the sites that provided this conversion had restrictions that limited how many look-ups you could do in a set period of time. This forced me to put together a wonderful piece of Perl code that did a round-robin http proxy, so I could then scrape out the data I really needed.

Now, Tiny Geo Coder does the conversions, with no restrictions and with a useful API. Plus, it has a nice tie-in with the Google Maps API. Good stuff.

posted 15 Nov 2008 in Doing

Vertigo

From the National Geographic:

posted 11 Nov 2008 in Doing

Apheresis - November 10

redcross.gif I got nearly to the end of Serenity today.

posted 10 Nov 2008 in Apheresis

Apheresis - October 27

redcross.gif Road to Perdition again.

posted 27 Oct 2008 in Apheresis

Apheresis - October 13

redcross.gif I watched Vanity Fair again, and still got only about 2/3 of the way through it.

posted 13 Oct 2008 in Apheresis

London IS a big city

Michael and Carole were talking last night, first about Dublin, then about their favorite cities. I added a comment that London was a big city, like New York. I then got nothing but grief, as they both went on and on about how many skyscrapers there were in New York, and that London didn't have nearly as many tall buildings, and how you could walk for miles in New York and become claustrophobic in the urban canyons, and I didn't know because I hadn't been to either city for decades.

As they went on about it, I chose not to press my argument - they were having fun and I was grumpy after a long day at work. If I had kept at it, I would have told them that London may not have as many skyscrapers as New York, but its population, population density, cultural impact, status as a financial center of the world, and drawing power for visitors makes it comparable to New York as world-class, big cities.

posted 9 Oct 2008 in Family & Friends

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