Previous Projects

MySQL Distance Calculations (10 Oct 2009)

One customer recently needed their website to know the distance between people. It did not have to include exact driving directions so we based it off of zip code latitudes/longitudes. We obtained these indirectly from the US Census Bureau and used fuzzy trigonometry.

The first step was to find a way to put the zip code information into a database. The latest available (circa 2004) which was easily workable came from http://www.boutell.com/zipcodes/.

USB Serial Numbers in Windows (05 May 2009)

A project required us to map the serial numbers of USB flash drives, to the DOS drive letters associated with them, with a very high degree of certainty. This is not the serial number of the volume (or partition) but of the device itself.

This means that if we insert a PNY Attaché 512 MB memory stick, and Windows assigns it the drive letter F:\, then we need to know that F:\ is a USB flash drive and that the serial number of that device is 075916911BF9.