Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Travel Progress

I did get everything on the app side working with traveling - finally! I can move around and things worked as expected. Except that I found major problems with the data file. *sigh* What I had originally done was to find the latitude and longitude of all of the cities in my list and then I went through to calculate the differences between it and other cities nearby to determine the cardinal directions. What I found though is that while I did pretty well in many cases I was WAY off in others. So I found a Mercator projection map of the US (which is what I'm going to start with for now) and I'm going through all of the US cities (I have about 75) and get them corrected. There are a couple of places where it'll seem a little weird, but is correct. For instance, you might be able to go southeast from a city, but the northwest from that city doesn't lead you back where you were but to a different city. So from a directional map perspective it might seem odd, but it works out. :)
My task today is to finish fixing the data file. And mowing the lawn. And cutting the suckers in the backyard (which is becoming like a fairy forest for lack of care). If I can get the data file fixed then I can move onto wands and spells. And while there is definitely a programmatic method for fixing this, I'm actually finding it a good mental exercise to do it by hand. Not so good for the carpal tunnel, though. :(
Also - here's a photo of the travel pane with some locations in it. If you're interested. :)