Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Oh those wacky geolocations.

So, yesterday I spent some time working up a nifty little display to make sure all the counties were showing up the way I needed them to.

I found out that most (about 45) of the counties in Colorado, actually showed up in Colorado... and some of them were showing up in other states.

Because I made a very naive assumption that County Names did not repeat in the US. And, like that assumption that birthdays don't cluster, it came as a nasty surprise. Thankfully, because I made sure to maintain the poicondai-loader project the way I did, it only took me the better part of an evening to change the loading scheme so that it supported county, state, and geolocation data.

The rest of today has been spent setting up some utility classes for pulling what I am calling PoiConCounts. I spent a lot of thought-chewing time figuring out the granularity of the objects for optimal caching and pulling (and many thanks to Brian for busting me out of the loop I was finding myself in) and just settled on "the thing that is going to be displayed". I have made this flexible, in case the way things need to be displayed or stored ever changes.

Tomorrow I will be trying to get that first county yank into a map with appropriate shading. If that goes well I will probably be ambivalent about whether to try and get the histogram-popup working or move on to zipcodes. But let's not fillet those fish yet...

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