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...

The data, it is in the database.

So today, I managed to get the polygons for the ~3500 counties into a database.

I used maven (and found some places where maven was being very odd). I used SAX (and found some places where SAX was being very odd). I used eclipse (and.. well, you get the idea).

It was one of those weird coding days... where I was pressed on only by the faith I had that I could get it working and that my brain had set it all up in my mind. And thankfully that seems to be the case. I was going to try and just brute force REGEX/parse the XML string into the objects I needed without using any sort of XML parser (because I wasn't that familiar with SAX/DOM/Etc) but I found out that I couldn't really think of a way to do it... and that is a good thing because I'm sure whatever I would have turned out would have been a candidate for some of those "LOL at this horrible code" type websites.

Instead, I have a little SAX parser that is elegant, fast, and coupled to a little prepared-statement inserter that is also elegant and fast. And I should be able to use it relatively quickly for when I need to load zipcodes.

Now, the next big step ahead of me is to finalize the "pull these counties and then draw these counties" map for poicondai. Then I also have to do the same thing for zip codes. And then make everything look better.

Here's to demonstrations.