Looks like I am going to commit another act of wanton server abuse this weekend...
Grabbed all the 2006_SE map files over the fourth. Now to add these to the collection. 73 from 807, Richard, N6NKO Tom Russo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Several weeks ago I conversed with Jason Winningham about a little chore related to the TIGER/Line 2006 Second Edition files that he had so painstakingly downloaded and processed into shapefiles with the aid of a large cluster of linux machines. This chore was the generation of the "geocode" files that make Xastir's "Find Address" feature work. Jason has used the same data files and linux cluster to regenerate the entire set of geocode files for all the TIGER/Line data. He made one file for each state (or territory) and a monolithic file of the entire collection. Having the individual states helps to limit the amount of downloading you need to do if you only need address geocoding for a small area. Having the smaller files speeds searches for addresses, too. But the full US file is still available. The files tend to be big --- the US.geocode file is 496MB, gzipped, and some individual states are as big as 30MB (such as Texas). If you only need one (or a few) state's worth of address geocoding, Jason has provided a fairly easy way to get hold of them. Or if you have a fat pipe and a big hard drive, you can download the entire country in one file. All of the geocode files are up on ftp://aprs.tamu.edu/pub/geocode/States and are available now thanks to Gerry Creager. To use these, gunzip the files into /usr/local/share/xastir/GNIS, and then you can use the "Find Address" feature in the Map menu. Just point the dialog box at the correct geocode file, and search away. The search feature is rather picky, so you might find that you have to get the address in a very particular form before it works. In Albuquerque, for example, all streets have a quadrant suffix (NE, NW, SE, SW) even when a street only exists in one quadrant, and addresses won't be found if the quadrant isn't given. The TIGER 2006 Second Edition data appears to be significantly improved over the older data, so at least in my neck of the woods these new geocode files produce much better matches of addresses to locations. I highly recommend them. Thank you again to Jason Winningham for running through all the TIGER data to produce these files, and to Gerry Creager for hosting them. And of course to Daniel Egnor for the GPL'd address geocoding tool that we use in Xastir. -- Tom Russo KM5VY SAR502 DM64ux http://www.swcp.com/~russo/ Tijeras, NM QRPL#1592 K2#398 SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM "And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit!" --- The Tick _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list Xastir@xastir.org http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list Xastir@xastir.org http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir