I've obviously not been around much lately. I could explain why in words, but they say a picture is worth 1000 words. Is it?
I guess not, since I clearly still have to explain myself.
To the left is San Joaquin County, California, gerrymandered into 8 nearly equally populated fake Congressional districts. And man, are they gerrymandered. Tom DeLay only wishes he could've made Texas look that funky while remaining contiguous.
I just wish the goofiness had been my goal ... or my goal via software, anyway. Because I did not create that map manually. I don't think such an unholy abomination is possible without the aid of a computer.
Fortuantely, I fixed the problem causing this monstrosity and the software now generally produces relatively compact districts when equalizing population between districts.
It is still very much a demonstration version, as a fake legislative office consisting of 8 seats in San Joaquin County, California is all you can redistrict. Of course, it can't be more than that until the 2010 Census is finished and data is released.
To try the software, you can go here, but don't all go at once. If you do, I fully expect the server (which is just a single machine used by GWU's Computer Science department for undergraduate student projects) to crash.
But certainly, a few people can try it (I should've had something to tell people how many other people were logged in/using the system, but I haven't [at least not yet]).