The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

The Quick-n-Dirty Ad-Hoc Location Targetting System, on the cheap

I dropped support for Soundex in the project I'm working on. In going over the diagnostic output when importing the data, I found that Soundex had over 6,000 collisions, while Metaphone had less than a 1,000, and shorter collion chains (i.e. most Metaphone collisions have only two possibilities). It just wasn't worth the disk space to use Soundex at that point.

Then it was on to work doing a mock up on the web. The logic is pretty much:

if city exists in latlong.database
then
  fetch data from latlong.database using city
  print data
  exit
end

tag = metaphone(city)
if tag exists in metaphone.database
then
  fetch cities from metaphone.database using tag
  if count(cities) is 1
  then
    fetch data from latlong.database using cities
    print data
  else
    print "select one from the list:"
    for each city in cities
      print city
    end
  end
end
exit

The mockup is quite plain in appearance, but that can be easily changed as most of the output is template based anyway. And it only works for the United States.

Next up, code in time zone and Day Light Savings Daylight Saving Time information for each city.

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