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

I dropped support for Soundex [1] in the project I'm working on [2]. In going
over the diagnostic output when importing the data, I found that Soundex had
over 6,000 collisions, while Metaphone [3] 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 [4]. 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 [DELETED-Day Light Savings-DELETED] Daylight
Saving Time information for each city.

[1] http://www.archives.gov/research_room/genealogy/census/soundex.html
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2004/10/12.1
[3] http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/metaphone.html
[4] https://boston.conman.org/cgi-bin/location/location.cgi

Email author at [email protected]

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