[lug] Maps and DLGs and stuff.

[D. Stimits]

John Starkey wrote:
> 
> > nicely for free, though I can't remember which they were (the company I
> > worked for wasn't interested in using anything that was free...there was
> > a fear level involved). So if you look around for java based support,
> > you can probably find it (I might be able to ask someone about it). One
> > of the things about many of the commercial products is that they use
> > stupid algorithms or bad caching that screws the cache, or just plain
> > hogs more memory than it should.
> 
> Yeah. I think I wanna avoid Java in this case. I saw one that was based on Grass and Java in Tokyo. Locked up using iMac and NN 4.7

There's actually a wide range of differences between full java, java
applets, and javascript, which are for the most part related mainly in
name, much less in how they are built. So I guess I'd have to ask exact
details of what form of java it was, and if it was a built in java
applet interpreter, or if it was a full version that the browser was
linked to? FYI, browser strengths for interpreters on one browser are a
weakness on the next. No matter what you choose, one of your browsers
will crash and die, and need medical care. Straight html is probably the
most reliable, but you can't even get that to display the same from one
browser to the next. In that case you'd have to do something like create
a jpeg or png and then send it as an image, rather than having a truly
interactive map.

> 
> > I had personally considered writing my own for C++ with Apache to use
> > the free Tiger data (Tiger is a subset of the U.S. census data, stripped
> > for only "interesting" mapping features...e.g., it skipped things like
> > household income). I made an import utility to get the basics into
> > MySQL, but never went further with it for various reasons. I am curious
> > what you are going to create?
> 
> Yeah I remember that thread, I was hoping to hear the status on that. Thanks.

I still toy around with it, but I want to work on a rewrite of a game
server right now (at least if it is done for free). I interrupted much
of what I was doing when I decided to upgrade from RH 6.2 to 7.1, and
use XFS filesystem. 'Twas a great learning experience (probably
worthwhile, but painful).

> 
> I've got a DB with a bunch of geo coords in it and I wanna offer maps of the areas. I've been trying to chop down the tifs from gisdatadepot.com (USGS data) but they are just too big. And if I tried quartering them in GIMP it'll take forever. Well over a thousand maps at that point. I've thought about scripting it here on my machine, quartering them with PHP, but then the upload would be a killer. Not too bad though, as a last resort.

FYI, the data for the Tiger subset of mapping data, in Colorado, expands
to something near 100 MB.

> 
> Ultimately I wanna grab the DLGs and DEMs from the DB and parse them in real-time. But as it stands right now I don't have the resources and the site is starting to get hit pretty hard.

You can do that if you build efficient tables with indices. Else it
becomes exponentially slower.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> Thanks for the reply,
> 
> John
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