A few years ago, during the MySQL Conference opening keynote, two world maps of MySQL downloads were displayed. With the lights down, they made an impression.
Oddly enough, to the best of my knowledge, the downloads map has not been drawn again since then. I asked my friend and colleague Markus Popp, and he provided the data from the downloads logs, leaving the implementation to me.
A first attempt with Google Maps API produced a chart that is nice to see for a single country or town, but hardly pleasant for the entire world.
Then, I abandoned the easy path, and looked at CPAN for inspiration, and immediately found something that could solve my problem. Using GD::Map, I quickly created a world map, and after a few minutes of fiddling with the innards, I manage to plot a map that looked like what I wanted.
.To get the red dots on a black background I simply used Gimp, and soon I had the results I was looking for.
2 comments:
Cool.
Now can you plot the download numbers against GDP and population?
Very cool!
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