Get some code

I spent a made two months really pouring lots of time and energy into code to produce the visualizaiton I have shared in this blog. In the process I learned a bunch about Ruby, KML, and Census data - and had great fun.

That was almost two years ago and I've consistently made promises to myself to get back on the wagon and keep working on the project. However, these just have not materialized.

Because of this, I've decided to open up the code, in its raw state, for public consumption. It is full of bad programming practices, from too many files to hard coded strings it would get an F in almost any code review. This prevented me from sharing it for a long time, but as the months kept ticking by and I didn't make any progress, I realized that either I was going to get it out there or it would simply die as a small blog.

Over the coming posts I'll share the structure in lots more detail, but to start, I wanted to share what the most important files are.

Let me give you a small tour around the code:

• GenPlacesKml.rb : This is the main file. This is what you "run". I've created many different "main" routines to create the outputs. This file also contains all of the code to create the actual KML document. I never created an object model for the KML components, I simply created functions that generated the components as rexml objects. This then gets dumped into the KML output file.
• Polygon.rb : This contains the definition of the Polygon object, which is the core object that holds the Census shape date. This also contains the routine to load Census shape data from a file.
• BlockGroups.rb, County.rb, etc. : These contain the objects to hold the Census meta data for each of the different types of geographies the Census creates. It also contains the method to load them.
• Data.rb : This is a generic data loading set of functions.
• Colors.rb : This generates the color palettes used in the files
• FIPS.rb : This contains some data definitions to do lookups on Census abbreviations.

If you want to start playing around with the code, the easiest "main" routine to look at is "genWABlockGroups()".

Now, where is the code? I've decided to use Google Code to share it & I've put it out under the GPL. This uses Subversion, which I am completely unfamiliar with, to store and share the code. It does seem like a powerful system, but I'm just learning how to use it appropriately. I am very open to any and all feedback on its proper setup and use.

I'm hoping the community is interested in breathing life back into the code. In the coming posts I'll walk through the structure (to the extent that it exists).

You can find the source at http://code.google.com/p/rubykml/