Coding is like gardening...

Geohashing at Eden Development

Geohashing is a game, best described as a random adventure generator! It combines the Dow Jones stock market index with the current date, performs an MD5 hash function, and converts from hexadecimal to decimal coordinates in order to generate a series of geographic coordinates all over the country. There’s usually a geohash within about 50 miles of your location, and it changes every day.

The aim of the game is simply to reach the coordinates, with possible side effects being the opportunity to get out, see new places, meet other people doing the same thing, play games at the geohash, etc.

On Sunday 30th August 2009 something very exciting happened: the geohash landed at Barton Farm, right next to the office of Eden Development! This was especially exciting since I (Aimee) am a keen geohasher! I came home early from my weekend away in Essex, and 4 geohashers came to celebrate!

We had to photograph the location for documentation purposes.

Chris very kindly let us have a geohash celebration party in the office!

I did a little tutorial on the whiteboard about how the geohash is calculated, and how it ended up on Barton Farm.

We printed and laminated a poster, showing us celebrating the geohash! Hopefully it’ll stay there for a while to come!

Here is a video montage i’ve made, with animoto.com:

For more information about the day’s events have a look on the geohashing wiki: wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/2009-08-30_51_-1

Posted on: Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 10:43 pm In category: fun, geohashing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.