Playing around with PHP ...

[+DragonsWest]

I wrote a School Finder in PHP for my employer (parents kept calling, wanting to know to which school their kiddos would go, so a little geocoding, tie into Google Maps API, create a cross reference, an address parser and voila!) So now I'm playing around with the NGS set of benchmarks for California (there's 63,757 on the May list) and seeing what I can do, simply as an exercise, but possibly with some use down the road.

 

Did you know there's a triangulation station called ZIPPY? Bit of a trick to get to, though.

 

Thought it would be fun to map these tings onto Google Maps or Google Earth, but can't quite see putting it on my meager website as the complete, uncompressed text is about 264 Mb.

[foxtrot_xray]

There's a program, DSWORLD thatg will let you map them on Google Earth, and I have a website (in PHP) that will let you view them live on Google Earth as well. (http://ngs.tsqmadness.com/ge/index.html)

[+billwallace]

Were you thinking of making something for your own use or to put up on the web to share?

 

One nice feature would be to be able to display a subset based on a user's query, like all the marks that have the word chisel in the data sheet. That's pretty cool, I use awk scripts to extract data sheets then run them through NGSREAD it's really fast. At the bottom of the NGSREAD page is an awk script that converts dat files to kml files (dat2kml) - it might be a useful template, I like the ballons it and NGSREAD make.

 

Monkeykat's Benchmark Viewer (mobile) are great for the web (ala google maps)

 

I tried foxtrot's kmz file in google maps the other day and it looked promising but the map kept refreshing every 15 seconds and whatever Google Maps wrapped it in wouldn't let me change that or turn off the USGS overlay - gonna have to read more about that, (THEY took my GE away at work, no more fantasy benchmark hunting at lunch )

[foxtrot_xray]

I tried foxtrot's kmz file in google maps the other day and it looked promising but the map kept refreshing every 15 seconds and whatever Google Maps wrapped it in wouldn't let me change that or turn off the USGS overlay - gonna have to read more about that, (THEY took my GE away at work, no more fantasy benchmark hunting at lunch )

??? I didn't know you could load KML/KMZs in Google Maps? This is news to me! Care to share how you did that?

 

--Mike.

[+billwallace]

If the kmz file is accesible via a url then you put the url (including the filename) into the Google Maps search box. I tried doing it with the file on my computer using 'file:\\filepathwhatever\...kmz', but it didn't work - so it has to be accesible via the web. I used the url for your file download. Just tried it the other day because I had a need. -- Google Maps Help: Viewing data from Google Earth

[+DragonsWest]

Were you thinking of making something for your own use or to put up on the web to share?

 

One nice feature would be to be able to display a subset based on a user's query, like all the marks that have the word chisel in the data sheet. That's pretty cool, I use awk scripts to extract data sheets then run them through NGSREAD it's really fast. At the bottom of the NGSREAD page is an awk script that converts dat files to kml files (dat2kml) - it might be a useful template, I like the ballons it and NGSREAD make.

 

Monkeykat's Benchmark Viewer (mobile) are great for the web (ala google maps)

 

I tried foxtrot's kmz file in google maps the other day and it looked promising but the map kept refreshing every 15 seconds and whatever Google Maps wrapped it in wouldn't let me change that or turn off the USGS overlay - gonna have to read more about that, (THEY took my GE away at work, no more fantasy benchmark hunting at lunch )

 

I haven't entirely worked out a strategy, other than wanting to have the whole pile at my disposal, to strip out quads or counties as I wish. Going back and forth between quad maps and downloads was a bit of a pain. Perhaps creating a PHP script on my server, which drops a temp.KMZ file to view on Google Maps would be highly desirable, then pick and choose a few targets and export them as GPX I could drop on the GPSr. At the moment it's some pretty neat reading.