TITLE: Geohashing in Ruby AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: May 30, 2008 6:13 PM DESC: ----- BODY: A while back I read this xkcd comic, which introduced the idea of geohashing, selecting a meet-up location based on a date, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, and MD5 hashing. Last month I ran across this wiki page on geohashing, which offers a reference implementation in Python. That's fine, even with all those underscores, but I decided to write a Ruby implementation for kicks. In particular, I had never worked with Ruby's MD5 digests and was glad to have a reason. So, during a few stolen moments at the roadshow workshop (summary soon...), I knocked off an implementation. Here's my code. It's very simple and can certainly be improved. I tried to use idiomatic Ruby where I knew it, but some bits feel awkward. In other places, I mimicked the reference implementation perhaps too closely, so they still feel Python-y. Please send me your suggestions! -----