Gregory's Server
In case anyone else needs a database of countries, states, and cities for their project, I found this:
https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/
It's public domain. Comes in a slightly cursed, but easily parseable binary format that apparently dates back to MS-DOS. There's also geojson on github. Contains a whole lot of information, including names in up to 21 languages, timezones, coordinates, populations... Perfect for events in #Smithereen ;)
Specification of this particular variety of .dbf format:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150323061445/http://ulisse.elettra.trieste.it/services/doc/dbase/DBFstruct.htm
And adding to that: fields have fixed lengths and are padded with spaces. Numbers are stored as decimal strings and padded with spaces from the left. There's no distinction between int and float in the field descriptors, both are 'N'.
Should be easy enough to import into any relational database, which is what I'm going to try now.
Specification of this particular variety of .dbf format:
http://web.archive.org/web/20150323061445/http://ulisse.elettra.trieste.it/services/doc/dbase/DBFstruct.htm
And adding to that: fields have fixed lengths and are padded with spaces. Numbers are stored as decimal strings and padded with spaces from the left. There's no distinction between int and float in the field descriptors, both are 'N'.