Re: [gpsd-users] location lookup

[Yan Seiner]

On Tue, March 20, 2012 12:46 pm, Gary E. Miller wrote:
> Yo Yan!

>
> Just download the flat file from the link I gave you.
>
> http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm
>
> It has lat/lons and place names.  Just search the file for the nearest
> lat/lon and take the associated place name.  Place names are tagged by
> type (city, mountain, etc.) so you can limit your search to just cities.
>

Any suggestions on how to do the search?  "nearest" is kind of hard to
figure out without doing a radius calc....  I'm not sure how to set up the
database and index it so as to minimize the computational effort in
finding the nearest point.

(Storage is not a problem - I have a hard drive attached. cpu and ram are
limited.  I have a 260 MHz CPU and 32 MB of ram.)

>
> I would be tempted to blow the flat file into an sqlite DB for fast
> searches.

Once I figure out what I'm doing, that may be a possibility.




-- 
On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into
the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not
able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could
provoke such a question.
—Charles Babbage, Inventor of the computer, 1864