Science is happy to release an open source geocoding engine built in pure Ruby for the Ruby on Rails environment. You can down load the plugin by following instructions here. (Update 10/21/07 - new features!)
The engine is capable, out of the box, of using MapQuest, Google and Yahoo API’s. All you have to do is obtain a free API key from the provider of your choice. If you get one from all three, you can play around to see which one you prefer.
Your input and comments would be welcome.
All it takes is a printer and a couple of stamps to send off some letters to the Congress and Senate. I sent a few and actually got responses back. Diane Feinstein was disturbingly ambiguous about her position. Barbara Boxer was more definitively in favor of a solution for internet radio. The only way you’ll know where your reps stand is by writing or calling them (writing is more effective).
I have some utilities to read and write zip files in an application I maintain. I’ve been periodically running into “buffer errors” in the GZipReader library of Zlib. I’ve been working around the errors in various ways but today I finally got stopped cold and had to figure out what was going on. It turns out that the RubyGems people have also seen this error and wrote some code to solve it. So I adapted their code to my purposes and I’ll share what I’ve got in hopes that someone else can use this stuff too.