On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Richard Rauch wrote:
> (It also depends upon whether there is any impetus to have some kind of
> meeting or the like.  If there isn't such an interest, the point of a
> regional mailing list is pretty limited.  If getting together for lunch,
> or some such, is desired...4 hours is a long time to drive for lunch.
> Probably even a Texan-born will admit to that.  (^&)

Yeah, I suppose 4 hours is a bit much for just lunch :) (mais je suis n=E9
au Baton Rouge, Louisiana :) I'd travel for, say a visit to Johnson
Space Center or something like that though :) (BTW, I hear the 25th is
open house there...)

> Hm, I'm not sure what IFPL is, but the map's interesting.  (^&

The IFPL is a database where you register with your name and location
(US or Canadian postal code, or latitude/longitude), and it'll show you
a list of other nearby people who have registered, along with how far
they are, contact info, etc... In the case of the IFPL, the registrants
are fans of anthropomorphic animals (aka. furries); I think something
similar for NetBSD users would be neat though :)

And I made the maps by getting the distances to the various people from
three different points, and doing a bit of trig to figure out their
lat/lon (I don't have access to the raw coordinate data, so I have to
figure it out from the distances). GMT's pretty cool though; I was
originally using xearth (since that's what NetBSD's maps were made
with), but when you zoomed to the city level, you'd just get a bunch of
points scattered on a plain background. I wanted to show roads as points
of reference, which I was able to do thanks to GMT and the USGS :)

> If someone has the means to set up such a NetBSD user database, and wants
> to do so, I'll contribute my little bit by giving a name & zipcode...

I probably don't have time to do it myself, but I have a US ZIP to
lat/lon table, a Canadian postal code to lat/lon table, and a formula to
compute the great circle distance between two points on a sphere (I
don't think we need to worry about an ellipsoidal earth for this :) If
anyone wants any of that stuff, let me know.

So you're at Rice now? I graduated from the University of St. Thomas,
not too far away from there :)