Press "Enter" to skip to content

Richy's Random Ramblings

How to find a New Zealand street in Google Maps

I’ve found something that the all-knowing and all-seeing Google cannot find! Streets in New Zealand. This is despite these streets being in its database!

So how can we pull up a nice Satellite view of a New Zealand street? Here’s how I did it.

First of all, know the name of the street you are looking for. For this example, I will use “Reeves Road” in Christchurch (South Island).

Now go to http://www.wises.co.nz/ and search for that road to make a map.

Now zoom out on the Wises map to get a good overview of the area.

Now go to Google maps at http://maps.google.co.uk and type in “Christchurch, New Zealand” to get as close as Google will allow you to search.

Compare the two maps until you can match up the major road names/locality names.

Zoom in on Google maps and low and behold – there’s your street! With it’s street name!

If you want to then see it in Google Earth (which doesn’t have street names and has the same resolution photos), then click “Link to this page” and in the URL bar at the top of Firefox/Internet Explorer, copy the &ll=-49……. section until the next & sign and copy that bit into Google Earth.

There you go – not that difficult, but fiddly.

Techy: Outdated Coppermine Finder

Whilst on the subject of outdated cPanel based things, I’ve just put together a quick little script to scan a cPanel based webserver for outdated Coppermine Photo Gallery installations.

As the notes state, the script isn’t pretty, it isn’t efficient, but it works.

Comments/feedback are appreciated.
Coppermine Gallery Outdated installation checker v0.01

Set $disableandemail to 1 to disable the scripts and email the users.

Techy: cPanel DNS Cleardown script

Do you have many “old” cPanel servers? Perhaps you have the cpanel servers configured in a DNS cluster for redudancy? If so, you may encounter the same problem as I did where you have “stale” (or old) DNS zones cluttering up the server. Here’s a script to get rid of any unused zone files (use at your own risk yadda yadda yadda – you will have to rebuild /etc/named.conf afterwards):

Mapping without Landmarks

After the previous post on Wikimapia, it was coincidence that I came across the BBC News’ “Landmarks Quiz”. Can you recognise 10 photographs of areas of the UK – but without the distinctive landmarks?

I did quite well scoring 7 out of 10 – I would have probably scored higher if: a) I didn’t stop disbelieving my score after the 5th round (perfect score up to then) and b) if I had actually seen some of the places with or without the landmarks!

How well can you do?

Wikimapia

I just thought I’d give Wikimapia a quick go and add my place of work (the LCB Depot on Rutland Street in Leicester) to the system:

Wikimapia looks good – but get it to integrate with Wikipedia itself and Google/Yahoo/MSN Maps and maybe even photographs and you’ll never need to leave the house again (as long as all pizza places have their numbers listed!)