20 Mar
2001
20 Mar
'01
11:11 p.m.
On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, John Lawson wrote:
Hey, you're an old Phone Guy.. wouldn't the
programs for PABXes that
use V&H coordinates for call-accounting be useful for this? There were
a bunch of them that ran on various PC-type platforms. I had three
running on a 1987 IBM PC-AT (in 1987) so it's even on topic, nyahh
nyahh nyahh!
I considered using V&H tables (which I am very well familiar with...V&H
tables rock! :) But the problem is I would have to map the city names of
the zip codes from the survey responses to the Bellcore city names in the
V&H tables, and that's not an easy task. I once wrote some FoxPro code to
do intelligent name matching from a real city name to the 10-character
Bellcore abbreviated city name, and that took a decent bit of work. I
don't know if I have that old code still laying around on some harddrive
around here. But the real hard part is figuring out how to plot V&H
coordinates onto a map of the US.
Anyway, it would've ended up being more work. And I never came across any
of the software you describe above. They probably had that for fancier
switches than I've played with.
I ended up pilfering latitude and lognitude coordinates by zip code off a
free zip-code lookup website by writing a Perl script that would make the
HTTP server request and then parse the relevant data out of the HTML when
it came back. It worked great, although the service
(http://www.zipinfo.com/) only allows 30 searches per day by IP address,
so I had to collect the data I needed over three and a half days :)
Tonight I found some pretty cool mapping software called WorldTime, the
so-called "swiss army knife" of world clocks. It's really geared towards
being a world time utility but it has a feature that allows you to enter
and then plot locations by latitude and logitude over a map of any part of
the world. You can have three different map projection views: spherical,
cartesian, and mercator. Once you selected all the points to plot, it
displays them over the map with the names you assigned to them. I found
the software on TUCOWS, but you can get it directly from
<http://pawprint.net/wt/>.
It took me a while to enter about 70+ lat. & lon. points but I did it and
have come up with a result. It looks like the optimal spot for the
Festival is definitely in the Rhodes Island area.
I'll put together the data and present it tomorrow.
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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