New Developer Locations map available
Hello web guys.
I hope there are still some people here who remember me. :)
Having never been keen on the Debian Developer Locations map(*), I
decided it was time to create something better. Please take a look at
http://people.debian.org/~treacy/developer-locations.html
I'd like to hear what others think of it.
The cool thing about this is that it uses google maps so it allows
you to zoom in on areas you are interested in. Notice how clustering
reduces the number of markers in areas of high concentration of
developers (necessary or the map is too slow). As you zoom in the
density decreases and fewer markers are visible on the screen so more
are displayed.
Of course, being able to zoom in makes mistakes in the data more
obvious. In particular, there are a number of people who claim to
live in the water. To be fair, some of those near the coast may have
entered a correct location but rounding has placed them on the wrong
side of the coastline.
To help developers get their coordinates in the correct format
and check to see the effect of rounding on their location I also
created http://people.debian.org/~treacy/coordinate-lookup.html .
I think this should be linked from the web site in
http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc (and some of the other
options for generating coordinates removed).
As an aside, I think that [+-]ddd.ddddd should be the only format
mentioned for the format of coordinates. Looking through the developer
coordinates, I noticed too many people make mistakes in generating or
entering other formats (what does an angle of 5924 mean?).
If there is interest in using this on the web site, I'd like to wait
a few weeks before switching. I will be contacting developers with
questionable coordinates and would like to give them a chance to fix
them. A few questionable locations on the current map does not look
too bad but I have found over 40 problems when using the new map.
(*)I feel free to criticize the map as I originally wrote the scripts to
generate it.
--
James Treacy
treacy@debian.org
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