[Xastir-dev] Re: [aprssig] Re: Getting Tiger2000 data?

[Derrick J Brashear]

Snarky comments inline, serious ones at the bottom.

On Fri, 13 Sep 2002, Curt Mills, WE7U wrote:

> > bother providing a copy as long as Census is going to make it available
> > themselves, for free?
> 
> Because the mapshots and geographynetwork data has been converted
> to Shapefile format.  The stuff from census.gov has not.

GDAL (gdal.velocet.ca) will do so. Anyone using xastir is using a platform
that GDAL runs on. Heck, even the Windows folks are. I don't turn off my
spare CPU cycles at night...

> Also it's not as easy to get what you might want.  

I learned how to use wget when I was a freshman. I could afford big enough
disks to download it all when I got a job. 

> It's confusing
> and time-consuming.  If just the shapes that were of interest to
> APRS were available somewhere by state, it'd be a quick download.

Seriously, though, maybe it's worth converting the Tiger/2000 data to
shapefiles. For the people on this list, at least, there's no reason to
use old data if the newer data is what you want. I haven't managed to have
time figure out why the "proper" fix for DOQ tiling doesn't work, but
maybe I can come up with some time to make a batch conversion script for
Tiger stuff.

-D