All entries for Monday 05 October 2009

Where are you?

Writing about web page http://en-gb.www.mozilla.com/en-GB/firefox/geolocation/

Mapping an IP address to a physical location is never going to be entirely accurate and that's perfectly understandable. (Also such accuracy would in many cases be undesirable.) Though I hoped, albeit it perhaps naively, without any reason and not for any particular purpose, that Firefox's Geolocation feature would be able to accurately identify the University. We have (I believe) the whole 137.205. block of IP addresses to ourselves which makes us a good sized target, so to speak. Now that I've got around to trying I've found it puts me several miles away. The demo linked above merely indicates Coventry, after some quick further investigation the exact location it thinks I'm at is 52.405837 latitude -1.512661 longitude. Which I'm not. You probably aren't either.

Mike Willis : 05 Oct 2009 12:49 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem