Talk:Main Page

Topics on this page which have clearly been handled or resolved can be found in the archives. When archiving a section of the main Talk page, please say so in the edit summary here.
Use Template:Graticule to generate a map of the graticule for graticule pages.
Use Template:Meetup graticule to generate a map of a day's location for meetup/expedition pages.

Conventions

You might want to come up with some basic conventions and outline them very clearly, very quickly. This site is going to explode pretty quick, and without any, it will become a mess.

EG:

Region/Graticule pages named "City Name, Country" where "City Name" is the most major (by population) urban center contained within it.
Activity pages named "YYYY-MM-DD GRATICULE"
Graticules referred to by top-left coordinate.
Hell, create a template for region/graticule pages so they have some semblance of consistency. And some sort of outline on what it should contain
(Descr of region, image of graticule, Activities Section, Notable Events Section).

Should states be abbreviated or spelled out in the list of graticules on the Region/Graticule pages? Currently is a hodgepodge and the OCD in me is cringing. --KDinCT 20:14, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Just my $0.02. NuclearDog 10:20, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

I think I like the first options best, makes searching (through Special:Allpages, especially) considerably easier. Working on Eindhoven, Netherlands right now. Also it might not be a bad idea to keep discussions on upcoming meetings to the talk pages. Nazgjunk 14:23, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

I personally just wanted to add that we need to set a convention on how the locations are listed. I personally liked them ordered by latitude and longitude (east to west and north to south) but they appear to be recently edited into alphabetical order. Which I do not think is as 'smart' because they are listed by only one city in the area and someone might accidentally add the area again using a different city. Once the list is long duplicates will be hard to spot.--h[User:KDinCT|KDinCT]] 15:19, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

The list of graticules on the Main Page gets this right, doesn't it? That is, the instructions are there. Execution of those is PEBKAC, of course. Nazgjunk 15:22, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

This has since been fixed back into locational order. --KDinCT 15:32, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

In most cases, though, these are sorted NtoS and then WtoE. In many cases, it would make much more sense to sort WtoE first because we already do that mentally with time zone divisions. --Tim P 22:58, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Graticules should be named by their lower right corner since the algorithm adds to the graticule's integer, right? Actually... it would be: (Lower right in NW Hemi, Lower left in NE Hemi, Upper right in SW Hemi, Upper left in SE Hemi.) That seems a lot for a convention, but all you have to say is "graticules are areas with the same integer coordinates." --TLP 15:30, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

I noticed that this convention causes the name of the graticule to not match the link. Is that an issue? --Scooter 18:32, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I just saw that too, but only in some places. Dublin is linked from the bottom left, Bremen is linked from the bottom right. 9i would think it would be reversed, but it's not...) --TLP 21:38, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

What should the convention be when a main city is split (ex. 61, -149(or -150) (Anchorage, Alaska) and 41, -96 West of 56th St; 41, -95 East of 56th St. (Omaha, NE))? My view is that these areas should be seperated and one will get visited sometimes and the other will get visited other times.--KDinCT 15:32, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

What if in a case like that, you have a city page that links to the individual graticule pages in the area? For now, you'd still leave the graticule pages on the main page. I'm thinking over this problem too for Philadelphia -- the city is basically on top of (40, -75) so there's 4 graticules in the area, only one of which I've named Philadelphia. --TLP 15:52, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd say in your case, for example, the same Philadelphia link should be listed four times (once per graticule) on the Main Page. The target page will explain the multigraticule situation, and maybe any locality-specific ways you handle individuals perhaps using more than one. —Christian Campbell 18:58, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah that could work maybe. It definitely would for just two graticules, but I wouldn't want to put four of them on one page, especially since the NE one in this case includes Staten Island and lower Manhattan. --TLP 21:40, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

In graticule pages, I suggest using the following template: {{graticule |map=<map lat="37" lon="-122"/> |e=East Bay, California |ne=Sacramento, California }} Zigdon 02:08, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I suggest that every project undertaken in relation to this wiki should be code-named "The Annexation of Puerto Rico" --Xkcd 21:53, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

This is of course excepting any project that actually involves annexing any part of Puerto Rico. --Xkcd 21:53, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Automatic land-water filter / other filters

geosplashing; see below for using DJIA==0 as a workaround.
--Pyron Beta 21,25 May 2008

Does anyone know of open-source data for determining whether a coordinate lies on land or water? This would be an interesting feature in a calculator which tries to automate this a bit so one does not have to manually check against a geohash calculator every day.

E.g:

every morning, calculate the days geohash
apply filters:
- is coordinate on land?
- is coordinate not in known list of bad regions (area 51, etc.)
- other personal filters, e.g. is coordinate < n miles from home
if pass all filters, notify of coordinate, provide image of (or link to) map

--Recursive 11:15, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Seems like http://www.openstreetmap.org/ found this data somewhere, so presumably it's only a matter of digging up that separate dataset and parsing it. Here's another mess of links: http://opensourcegis.org/

OSM has some form of land detection, but it's a little crude. The readme in [1] should provide the details required. -- Edgemaster

(of course, this isnt the exact data in the OSM database, but a highly simplified version) If you want to go to the trouble of parsing all of the coastline shapefiles, they're here: [2]

And a third edit to say that we use this datasource.

Of course, having the data is not necessary, merely being able to query a web service for whether a coordinate is land is sufficient. The crudest approach would be to graphically scrape google maps, but, that's kind of lame. --Recursive 11:24, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

So i'll assume by kinda lame you meant awesome and i went ahead and implemented that, here it is: Enjoy

Wouldn't it be simpler just to have a standardized method of determining where to go if the geohash is over water? Say, "Follow shortest straight north, east, south, or west line to land and meet at the coast" or something along those lines. -- Curtmack (67.141.84.48 01:44, 22 May 2008 (UTC))

But whats the point of simple when it ruins my fun. Also i think it'd be better to try to keep everyone meeting at the geohashes or as close to as possible. Then we'll get custers of people. More people means more fun :). check out the implementation of this here: [Finding Alternative Geohashes]

Hence the point of a standardized method. Although I agree, it is more fun to try and go over water, but it could be horrendously difficult and downright impossible in some cases (i.e. your geohash is several miles out on water and all you can conceivably rent is a rowboat). Just a thought anyway. Curtmack 00:26, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Active Graticules

Can it be done to automatically sort the active graticule list? --Psud 11:49, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

be useful if people started catergorizing their pages too --Ryan the leach 12:34, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

What if we redo the active graticules entirely? Better soon than later. Create a "Active Graticules" page with lists of all graticules, and then only list the most active graticules on the main page? --Tsen 13:53, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. There should be a page of ALL graticules and then once it has had more than 5 visits (or some other arbitrary number) it can be moved to the 'active graticules' list on the main page. --KDinCT 14:10, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

How can we add new Graticules? I live in South Africa and Geocaching itself is a becoming a big deal. Can we add an African region? More specifically a South Africa; and then Johannesburg?

Just edit the main page, copy/paste an existing entry, alter it to match your location and save. It should create a link to your page, which should still be blank. Then edit that, (perhaps copy/pasting another graticule's page to keep a semblance of order) and add all you want.

On another note, I'd be willing to reorder the pages for Active Graticules and cut down the bulk, but what criteria should we use for "More" active graticules? Since this has only really hit the interwebs in the last day, there hasn't been time to see which areas are really going to be busiest. Do we create an active graticule page now, removing them all from the front page and then adding more active/interesting ones to the main page as they come up? --Tsen 03:25, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

What about just having categories for "at least 10 users", "at least 50 users", "at least 100 users", "at least 500 users", "at least 1000 users" etc. There seems to be a convention developing of listing user names in each graticule for those who are interested in participating (though this probably doesn't scale well... perhaps an average count of recent Saturday participants instead?). Then as time goes by and they grow, we can just start linking to bigger and bigger category pages to see the most active groups. --Cahlroisse 05:44, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I would suggest that, after this weekend, a graticule is only listed as active if a meeting has taken place. That is, it has been proven that at least two strangers have actually met on a weekend by geohashing in the graticule.--121.73.94.250 05:55, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

But what if it was inaccessible? --Tim P 20:55, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Negative coordinates and adding versus appending

There's possibility for confusion with regard to graticule coordinates. For example, the larger NYC graticule's longitude ranges from -73 to -74. If, like it seems in the comic, you're supposed to append the random <1 number to the coordinate, then NYC's graticule should be listed as 40, -73 (since every point within the graticule has longitude -73.xxxxx). If, however, you're supposed to add the random <1 number to the graticule, then NYC's graticule should be listed as 40, -74 (since the random number is always positive, this will always lead to a -73.xxxxxx number unless the random number is zero). I therefore recommend changing the algorithm to specify adding the random number, not appending it.

As a side note, the implementation of the algorithm linked to from the comic reflects this confusion. If the link includes the 'abs' parameter, it gives the coordinates of the NYC graticule as 40, -74: http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html?lat=40&long=-74&abs=1 However, if the link does not include 'abs' parameter, the longitude has to be changed to -73 to give the same graticule: http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html?lat=40&long=-73

The map always marks the northwestern edge of the graticule - otherwise, it'd have to add a parameter for N/S and E/W. So when given the 'abs' argument, it takes your coordinates as the northwestern corner, and without it they're parsed as what the comic presents them as. Perhaps this should be made more explicit though. Zigdon 18:22, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

This absolutely needs to be made more explicit. --Tim P 23:44, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Most of graticules are already referered using the -0 convention (except few ones in United Kingdom). Again, the whole problem has been sum-up (including reference implementation change) in page -0 Issue. And yes, it should be made explicit. --Gissehel 13:54, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Larger Events

If this turns out to be successful, I think it would be nice to group sets of graticules together and have state- or even national-based events (although this may be tricky in nations that cross timezones... maybe we could just have time-zone based events) for special occasions. StJimmy

How are you going to do that when you have no idea where you'll be going or even if it's public property? Gormster 15:38, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Radio Frequency Standard

How about coming up with a frequency standard that we can use with two-way radios? Then anyone in the vicinity can announce their arrival and meet with the others nearby. --waq

Agreed. This way, nobody should feel the need that they have to trespass. Obviously, in any case, you'll still have people who will try, but at least you can mitigate the possibility.

Only potential problem is for the non-Saturdays, who's to say when anyone will show up? 16:00 local time is only the standard for Saturdays. On a Monday, someone could go at 12:00, announce his (near) arrival via radio, and no one would answer. That wouldn't stop anyone from trespassing alone at 20:00. --Tim P 19:17, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

BTW, I suggest FRS Channel 6, if for no other reason than the comic number ends in '6'. --Tim P 19:19, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. I formally propose that FRS Channel 6 (US) and PMR446 Channel 6 (Europe) be made the official xkcd geohashing radio communication standards. Waq 12:26, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Achievements

I made an Achievements page to list some extra challenges that can be achieved so people can brag about some of the harder places they've gotten to (eg, i've got a Water GeoHash achievement when me and a friend hired a boat and went to the location on water). I thought of a few, but needless to say there are quite a few possibilities. zorg

New award?

So, I discovered I can see the point from my backyard. Is there an award for that? 2008-05-24 40 -111 McKay 18:27, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I think that gets the Superbly Lazy Couch Potato Achievement. Darcy 01:56, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

I shouldn't think so. Just because he can see the spot from his backyard doesn't mean it's in his backyard. --Tim P 03:50, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

hahaha thats just unlucky really, so close but so far. --Zorg 04:03, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Another achievement

How many points can you reach (in different graticules) in one day? Would require some luck, but it would be an awesome achievement / high score page. Or a different variation- choose a time frame (say a week 1 year ago) and visit all of the points from that time frame in as short a time period as possible. Thoughts? 70.162.29.88 22:58, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Facebook

It was inevitable, because I am a Facebook whore: Geohashing on Facebook I might start work on an app after I finish my current one. Gormster 12:51, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

There are also some local groups. So far, I know of: Geohash - Toronto, IVSLO Geohashers (Southern Cal somewhere?), and Geohash - Denver (which I created, for the record). --Doubt 21:00, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

I've also created Oklahoma City Geohashers. Trvsdrlng 19:51, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

iPhone Implementation

Last night I finished a rough implementation of this to the iPhone 2.0 Beta SDK. Right now it uses your current location and date and then does the math, then gives you a map with the destination address along with directions to there from where you are at. This will be even more useful if the next 3G iPhone come with GPS, until then it uses it's less accurate cellular and wifi location tools to locate you. I plan on adding a way to select your date and your desired graticule as well. Eventually I'll also investigate filtering of the results in watery areas. I can't distribute it currently, but as soon as I can I'll make it available. -- Shakedown

Atom Feed

I noticed yesterday that before the stock exchange data becomes available, the atom feed creates a kind of 'intemediary' geohash using todays date and yesterday's data. This might be intentional, but personally I find that undesirable on weekdays. Could it be modified to show yesterday's date and geohash until data is available? Nicktaylor 14:04, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm currently working on getting an alternative Atom Feed implementation ready for public use (although I think I'm going to wait until the Time Zone issue is resolved). Mine will only update at 09:40 Eastern daily (accounting for DST changes), and uses the irc.peeron.com source for the DJIA, which is updated at 09:35.

I will certainly post it here when it's done, so stay tuned. --Tim P 20:10, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

The time zone issue has been resolved with the 30W Time Zone Rule. I'll continue to work on getting my implementation ready. --Tim P 04:34, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't know if I'll bother with my Atom implementation. I copied your original request at Implementations; I'll keep an eye on it there. --Tim P 05:17, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Missing Historical Data

There is a good chance that no one cares, but the reference Geohashing Coordinate Calculator will not work for several valid dates. I think some just havent been copied from the previous day, but some may have just been missed. I've put a list of those dates up, delete it if you'd like. --ZorMonkey 14:20, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

FunkyTuba regenerated the data, using a more complete source, so there shouldn't be any more days missing. Do let me know if you find more. Zigdon 08:34, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Using the Dow is a Bad Idea

If this wasn't including the DJIA, then people would be able to know in advance where these things will be. While that might potentially be thought of as less fun, it will allow for carpooling and other more renewable forms of transportation, and other advantages of advance notice, such as the ability to secure permission from private property owners

Randall, would you please endorse a fork of this which uses DJIA == 0, for those of us who dearly wish to participate but, for example, are surrounded on three sides by water, and anyone else who could benefit from advance notice? Thank you for this fun idea. Pyron Beta 14:21, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

More time to plan and coordinate would be nice in some cases, but I think the surprise of not knowing where you'll be going is key. It wouldn't be as interesting if you could see all meeting points for any day in the future. Maybe a compromise would be to use DJIA from X days ago, giving you X days of planning? --ZorMonkey 17:23, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

A long advance list of meetup locations would result in far more people picking and choosing rare meetups every few months that are most convenient, both (a) removing the regular get-together element that was a major goal, and (b) fragmenting the attendance at any particular meetup greatly in already-sparse graticules. I also, to try to make the system unkillable, built in little advance notice to limit word trickling out to the 'real world' about upcoming meetups. I don't want the police being sent lists of next month's meetups so they can have a patrol car nearby, overly paranoid nearby-property owners making a point to be around, etc. It's our responsibility to act appropriately and avoid trouble, but the short meetup time makes it more likely that we'll fly under the radar. No reason to invite confrontation.

For graticules with a lot of water or other geographic problems, I don't think the advance coordinate list is really what you want. It would just mean a few rare meetups a couple times a year, which is what big conventions already are.

Social circles used to be extremely local, with people only having friends in their hometown. Now they're extremely global, with people seeing friends for giant parties a few times a year. I want a middle ground. So the idea with geohashing is taking these cool internet cultures and giving them a bit of a geographic focus, pulling people from similar geographic areas for regular meetups.

Hence, if geography is a problem, what I'd recommend is that you get together with people in your graticule and come up with a custom solution for your region, then follow that. The official geohashing structure -- which is at this point hopefully set in stone -- is just a starting point. Coordinate generation is a toy for your region to play with. Take this as an excuse to get to know each other, then come up with something that's right for your area. --Xkcd 18:19, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Mapping tool appears borken (5/25/2008)

My test case:

Go to Mapping tool.
Zoom out a few, to see the US West coast.
Center-up on Santa Cruz (if you don't know where that is, use San Francisco.)
Zoom in a few, to get a nice view.
Press UPDATE button. (Btw, I'm on Safari, on Mac OS-X/Leopard-latest.)

EXPECTED: A map-pin and coordinates that you can review. ACTUAL: Pin & coordinates flash for a brief moment, then map recenters on Boston, with information gone.

NOTE: Things all worked fine yesterday and the day before (5/23-24.)

Aside: Is there a "bug reporting system", or is this it? :)

Thanks! Ted 18:55, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I can't seem to reproduce this in FF or Safari on OSX 10.4.11. Does safari have a javascript error console where it might be logging the error? Zigdon 19:10, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

As far as bug reporting, this is one way, a better was is to come into IRC and talk to me there. Go to http://mibbit.com, select "foonetic" from the pulldown server, and #geohashing for the channel. Zigdon 19:10, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Google Earth app

It would be interesting if we could somehow tie these pictures that people are uploading in with the google earth program- an app that lets you select a graticule, get a list / visual of points that have been geohashed, and retrieve pictures specific to those points. 70.162.29.88 20:14, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm already generating a KML file that can be used in google earth (and maps) to look at active graticules. If there was a page listing all the images and where they should be placed, it would be trivial to include those images there as well. Zigdon 23:28, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Since all of the pages for specific meetups have the same URL format, they could just be scraped off of the meetup pages- if the meetup page has that image on it, it gets listed for that location. There's probably an easier solution though...

Cookie/Bookmark?

Is it possible to set one's browser to always start at a certain point when viewing the geohash calculator? The first time I visited it (when I was at home in Berkeley), it started out zoomed to my home graticule. Now that I'm at my parents' (in Los Angeles), it defaults to the Boston graticule. I don't know if this is something to do with our respective internet providers or if something has changed with the mapping program, but it would be great if there were an option to default the map to the current view (whatever that may be). If there's already something that I'm missing, someone can just enlighten me. Thanks!!! Darcy 02:15, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that would be useful. Done. Zigdon 06:56, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Awesome, thank you! Darcy 16:24, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Using the Dow is a Bad Idea for anyone east of the US

Please consider time zones next time :( - some poor european guy

See 30W Time Zone Rule. There's already been a whole load of discussion about us non-americans, and the final decision was that if you in Europe, Asia, Australia, or just about anywhere that isn't North or South America you use the prior day's Dow. Just means you get a bit more warning that the Americans. --Psud 11:25, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

And the previous discussion: Talk:Main Page/Archive#Europe Time Zones problem --Psud 11:30, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Is it just me, or is the shell script borked?

Shell script bombs out for me in two places :(

This:

[[ "$DOW" != +([0-9.]) ]]

Was always returning true, so exiting the script with a "DOW not available yet.". I replaced that with

[[ -z "$DOW" ]]

to get past it.

then it falls over elsewhere with:

./geo.sh:1: unrecognized modifier `0'
./geo.sh:1: unrecognized modifier `1'
,

For reference, the script reads:

#!/bin/zsh
DOW=$(wget -qO- http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/data/$(date +%Y/%m/%d))
[[ "$DOW" != +([0-9.]) ]] && echo "DOW not available yet." && exit 1
MD5=$(echo -n "$(date -dW30 +%Y-%m-%d)-$DOW"|md5sum|cut -d' ' -f 1|tr a-f A-F)
echo "$1$(echo 10k16i0.${MD5:0:16}p|dc), $2$(echo 10k16i0.${MD5:16}p|dc)"

does it work for other people?

And by the way, is the date modifying in the right place? Shouldn't it retrieve yesterday's dow and caculate with today's date in 30W cases - rather than retrieving today's dow and using yesterday's date for the hash?

I've so far worked out that it's failing on the line:

echo "$1$(echo 10k16i0.${MD5:0:16}p|dc), $2$(echo 10k16i0.${MD5:16}p|dc)"

Better yet, I've further narrowed it further. The parts my system doesn't like are:

echo "$1$(echo 10k16i0.${MD5:0:16}p|dc), $2$(echo 10k16i0.${MD5:16}p|dc)"
                             ^ ^^   ^^                          ^^   ^^

It doesn't understand the numbers and it reports "command not found" for "dc"

--Psud 08:49, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

The Perl reference implementation

I've been playing with the Perl reference implementation, and as I'm in Australia, I found it annoying to deal with its poor 30W capability. So I "fixed" it. Perhaps.

<snip> I updated the sample.pl to have a '-e' flag. If you run it with it, it will report the values according to the 30W rule:

$ ./sample.pl 2/1/08
Downloading DJIA from google: http://finance.google.com/finance/historical?cid=983582&startdate=Jan+25,+2008&enddate=Feb+01,+2008
DJIA opening for 2008-02-01 is 12638.17
Date: 2008-02-01, DJIA: 12638.17
MD5(2008-02-01-12638.17): 917a4419e1345e42569bad9fa5ef5a17
Split: 917a4419e1345e42, 569bad9fa5ef5a17
Fractions: 0.5682718814070582, 0.3383129610792229

$ ./sample.pl -e 2/1/08
Adjusting for 30W
Downloading DJIA from google: http://finance.google.com/finance/historical?cid=983582&startdate=Jan+24,+2008&enddate=Jan+31,+2008
DJIA opening for 2008-01-31 is 12438.28
Date: 2008-02-01, DJIA: 12438.28
MD5(2008-02-01-12438.28): ec6464f6d4d0da51c0c8fe874be8601c
Split: ec6464f6d4d0da51, c0c8fe874be8601c
Fractions: 0.9234068968406207, 0.7530669288934475

Zigdon 21:36, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

What happens....

...if the dow falls below 7 characters? Shadow 16:32, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Firstly, Dow values are currently usually 8 characters. Secondly, the Dow is always appended to the date string as a regular number with two digits after the decimal point. No zero-padding, no commas, no nothing. Just a straight number, e.g., 1988-01-04-1950.76 or 1982-04-04-833.24. --Tim P 17:01, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Coordinates good until new ones?

What is the convention for reaching a coordinate the next day before new coordinates are available? I wasn't able to get to today's hash but could do so tomorrow before the Dow opens. Does this still "count"? Tytrain 22:20, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

I think that's a reasonable interpretation... there aren't any "rules," per se... If you do go and make an expedition page for it here, though, you might want to mention that you went on a day other than what was used for the algorithm. --Tim P 03:13, 27 May 2008 (UTC)