[Xastir-dev] first cut at geocoder

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Curt, WE7U wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Derrick J Brashear wrote:
>
> > It's the whole U.S., distilled from the Census data, which is something
> > like 3gb zipped, right?
> >
> > Nothing precludes us from splitting by state and having the dialog take a
> > directory and knowing to look for state files in there.
> >
> > I did that the first time I used the geocoder (on my previous laptop)
>
> Looks like we need someone to write another split script, or perhaps
> just to split these files up and make them available individually
> for download.  The format for the downloaded file is not text, so
> perhaps it has fixed-length records or a special terminating
> sequence for each record?

i could just build the pre-split versions of them and make them available.
i will try to do that tomorrow, and at the same time get the tools working
and checked in in a subdirectory.

> Now... What kind of GUI functionality do we want?  Perhaps make a
> big line with an arrow from the current location to the found
> address, so that you can drive to it?  Give me some ideas here!

Maybe something else to consider here: I'd like to teach KisMac how to
tell Xastir where access points are and have them be drawn as I drive,
while not breaking the APRS station functionality. I could make another
APRS interface, but the problem is I don't want to steal from the APRS
object set, since it would be wrong. People want to use KisMac with
gpsdrive, and I think Xastir supports a superset of the datasets and
functionality that gpsdrive does (except maybe friendsd, since there's not
really a useful way to plot positions of non-amateur-radio-licensees)

but i lack a good idea for how to do this