Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 2, Mapping Your Neighborhood

#15 Zoom Right In on Your Neighborhood

HACK

MapQuest, and it will get you a map. But where is the place described by

that map? My daughter wanted to know where New Orleans is. She went to

MapQuest and searched. And MapQuest presented exactly what she asked

for. Try it! The city appears on the banks of Lake Ponchartrain. But where

the heck is that? Molly zoomed out, and out, and out, until Texas appeared.

“Ah, I see now where it is.”

To save her from the effort of ever again clicking “zoom out” three times in

rapid succession, I wrote a little script called boomzoom.cgi. I called it this,

because the first person who saw it said that it looked like the earth as

viewed from a rapidly approaching ICBM. Now, as it turns out, my friend

wasn’t all that far off: Cartographers actually have a term for this kind of

instant zoom-in orientation, which they call ballistic navigation. But some-

how “boomzoom” was the name that stuck for me.

You can run it at http://www.mappinghacks.com/cgi-bin/boomzoom.cgi. Enter

the latitude, longitude, and text to mark your center point, and then select

“Make zoomy thing,” as shown in Figure 2-6.

The Boomzoom program proceeds to fetch about 10 images from the

TIGER Map Server

[Hack #14], and then stitches them together to make an ani-

mated GIF. Each image is shown for just long enough to give an idea of

what it is showing, before giving ...