Where's That Number?

Update: I no longer run the code required for this to work. I’ve only left the post up as a little reminder to myself.

Every been given a number and thought ‘I wonder where that is?’ or seen an area code you didn’t recognise and want to know where it is? No? Oh, OK.

If on the other hand the answer was yes to either of those then I’d like to present the “UK number mapper” (yes the name’s bad…). If you enter a fixed phone number, a land line, not a mobile, that’s located in the UK this little ball of Perl and GMaps will try to find it on Googles lovely maps. It’s worth noting that the granularity isn’t that great. The free information I had available when I wrote this wasn’t that precise. If you want to try it out for yourself, enter your number in the form below, well, the form’s no longer below. I no longer maintain this service so I’ve removed the form.

Disclaimer: I make no attempt to log any of the numbers queried. Some of them may end up in my Apache logs due to errors or GET requests but I’ll be nuking this log every day or so.

This neat little hack was made possible by the wonders of CPAN, and especially Dave Cantrell’s Number::Phone module. Dave was also kind enough to discuss some of the details of area codes with me when I had some… naive questions. I also made use of Geo::Google for grabbing longitudes and latitudes.

I’d like to note I take no responsibility to any tech support personal that get hunted down once their location is known :)