I'm sure there's a bunch of online ways to convert a U.S. address to a lat/long, but for some reason I always have problems finding one when I need it. Anselm told me there was an open source lat/long server available that used the U.S. Census Bureau's Tiger data, so I tracked it down. Turns out it's that thing that won the 2002 google programming contest and was written by Dan Egnor whom I met yesterday. Dan must be the uber alles alpha geek of geo-geeking between that hack and his cool mobile Tron-GPS game (see my previous blog posting).
So I compiled his code on the headmap server and hacked in a few minor changes to turn it into simply an address->lat/long conversion server (his geocode server does much much more). You can try it out here: lat/long lookup. Since it's GPL I guess I'd be in violation if I didn't offer the altered source code, so email me if you want it, but the changes are so minor you'd probably be able to do it yourself just as quickly.
"Tron-GPS game"... i look and look and couldn t see any reference to it... bouuhhhhhh.
Posted by: Paul | 2003.10.14 at 12:08 AM
"Tron-GPS game"... i looked and looked and couldn t see any reference to it... bouuhhhhhh.
Posted by: Paul | 2003.10.14 at 12:08 AM
Hi Paul,
I'm not aware of any online references, but I think he had just finished it before the weekend so he may not have published anything about it yet.
Keep an eye out on his website: http://www.ofb.net/~egnor/
Posted by: Dav | 2003.10.14 at 02:12 AM
cheers,
i hope you guys are well, give a kiss to Mie from me.
speak soon,
Posted by: Paul | 2003.10.14 at 10:26 PM