Moved Blog to Wordpress


I moved my blog over to Wordpress today (http://adamw523.wordpress.com/). Feeds should be updated if you are using the FeedBurner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/adamw523)

Geonames Ruby API

The Geonames graphical database contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.3 million unique features whereof 2.2 million populated places and 1.8 million alternate names. It was created by Marc Wick, a software engineer in Switzerland. He has released it under a Creative Commons license and was nice enough to provide a freely available Web Service to integrate it into your applications.

The Geonames web service has proven itself very useful to me for the development of Carpool Connect. I'm currently using it to reverse geocode longitude and latitude coordinates and plan on using other features of it in the future.

I've put together a ruby library for accessing the Geonames Web service and released it under the Apache Open Source license. You can find more information about it on the project page.

To insatall:

# gem install geonames

Example Usage:

require 'geonames'
places_nearby = Geonames::WebService.find_nearby_place_name 43.900120387, -78.882869834
p places_nearby

country_subdivision = Geonames::WebService.country_subdivision 43.900120387, -78.882869834
p country_subdivision

Temporary Outage

The server hosting YakAlike, Carpool Connect and some other small services had a hard drive fail in the recent days / weeks. I say "weeks" because it has been failing for a while, but still mostly usable.

Carpool Connect has been moved off to another service provider, while YakAlike will be down until data can be restored off the old hard drive. Sorry for any inconveniences, things should be back to normal, and more reliable within a day or two.