Cool new GIS code

It’s the last day before I go back to face the tail end of deadline days at the magazine. I’ve done what I can to catch us up – 5 articles reviewed and edited over the weekend, and a few thousand ednote ideas come and gone. Who am I kidding? I’m never going to think of anything.

I did a session at ASP.NET Connections last October, where I demoed a GPS program that I’d ported to the .NET Compact Framework. Since it was presented as GPRS, not GPS, we managed to get about 12 people in the room. It was a great talk, too. I actually rehearsed it in advance, and worked on my delivery a bit. I’m up to a C+ in delivery style now.

After the conference, I put the source code up on my DirecTVInternet account so that people could download it. Of course, DirecTV then pulled the plug on their ISP, and I fled to Speakeasy. Nice folks over there, but I haven’t figured out how to use my shell account properly. So the download is still unavailable to the near-dozen people clamoring for it.

So what I might do is crank out an Editor’s Note on the code sample, which would mean that I could then pop it onto the magazine server at Microsoft and let people at it there. We do have occasional requests for it (no, really), so that’ll get it off my hands for good.

For this year’s Connections show, I’m writing another program that does mapping from the Tiger/LINE database – now available for free from the Census Department. More on this code later, it’s really cool.