Countries that I've been to
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Although not Lisp-related, I found
this site quite interesting - it lets you specify the countries
that you've visited and then draws a world map based on what you've
input. The above map shows the countries that I've been to. Hmm, it's a bit difficult to pick out that I've been to small
countries like Western Samoa and
St Lucia; but it isn't difficult to see that there are big swathes of
the world that I haven't been to yet!
In order to keep a Lisp connection in this posting, I should point
out that Edi Weitz's
CL-GD library (which provides a
UFFI interface to the
GD Graphics Library) could be used to dynamically manipulate
images in order to create this type of map. CL-GD comes with excellent
documentation detailing how to use it (typical of Edi's
libraries!). Some other graphic alternatives are listed
here and
here. Alternatively, one could use
SVG to draw the map and use one of the
CL XML libraries to generate the SVG. SVG would actually probaby
be a better bet for this type of image as SVG provides loss-less zoom
(so I would have been able to zoom in on St Lucia on the map!).
