Re: new GEONAMES, two-million city data

Bill J Gray Aug 15, 2004

Hi folks,

Arturo, many thanks for providing this data! I have long wanted
something that would bridge the gap between the 4400-odd city names
provided with Guide, and the two million city names. The latter is
really rather inconvenient in some ways.

To fix some problems in the two-million (let's call it 2M) city
database, I would recommend downloading the following file and
unZIPping it in your Guide folder:

http://www.projectpluto.com/ecu.zip (about 8 KBytes)

This includes a fix I made a while ago (and didn't realize wasn't
part of the standard update files!). With it, you will be able to
go to Extras... Toggle User-Added Datasets, click on "Detailed
Cities", and then set the fields of view at which cities are shown,
and their color, and so forth.

There were problems with this previously, because the cities
are stored in a series of files, one for each country. The above
file includes a keyword, "multi-file", which the current update to
Guide interprets to mean "a single dataset is described in this file,
but the dataset consists of many files." Not something that much
use is made of, but it's almost essential to this case.

Arturo, I'd recommend against attempting to make a two-million
name version of 'geonames.dat', for two reasons. First, with the
above file, it ought not to be necessary. Second, I think you will
find it to be _very_ slow. With the current approach, the two million
names are split by country, and Guide can usually skip most of the
countries. But already, if one of those countries is Russia, Guide
will slow down when showing city names. If it had to look at all
two million names, _all the time_, it would grind to a halt.

-- Bill