Cyberstarweb

Archive for April, 2008

This post is off topic, but I recently recieved a call from a what I thought was Telemarketer. The caller id on my telephone read “Research Center 231-224-2031″.

They asked me if I would answer a few questions about “Household Services”. In return for my time, they promised that I would receive a ten dollar gift card from Target.

“Yeah, right, another scam”, I thought.

But the offer was enticing and I went ahead and answered about ten minutes worth of yes/no questions. At the end of the question and answer session, they took my name and address and promised to send me the gift card. I didn’t really believe them, but I took my chances and gave them the information.

About two weeks later my gift card arrived in the mail! I went to Target and splurged on some clearance items, parlaying my ten dollar bonanza into a sizable value based on original retail. All is well.

Moral of the story – be very careful, but sometimes telemarketers can be trusted!

Here is a quick way to find your latitude and longitude. It is a PHP script using the Google geocoding service. The Google Store Locator demo on this site utilizes the latitude and longitude from such a request to locate nearby Cyberstarweb locations. With this script as a start, you could build an entire site like geocoder.us

Here is the PHP source code of the geocoder.php

php


   set_error_handler('errorHandler');


   function errorHandler ($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline, $errcontext)

{

	//suppress all errors

}


   if ($_POST['address'] != "") {

   		doGeo(urlencode($_POST['address']));

   		}


   function doGeo($marker) {

   // Your Google Maps API key

   $key = "Your key here";


   // Desired address

   $address = "http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=$marker&output=xml&key=$key";


   // Retrieve the URL contents

   $page = file_get_contents($address);


   // Parse the returned XML file

   $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($page);


// Retrieve the desired XML node

//   echo $xml->Response->Placemark->Point->coordinates;


   // Parse the coordinate string

   list($longitude, $latitude, $altitude) = explode(",",

        $xml->Response->Placemark->Point->coordinates);


   // Output the coordinates

	echo "

".urldecode($marker)."



Longitude: $longitude, Latitude: $latitude

";

}

?>