My Blog of Japan Japan!

Panoramio Photos

I’ve been using Panoramio photos a lot in my Japan Trains pages, where each station will display the nearest pictures pulled from Panoramio. The Panoramio API is a little bit difficult to deal with, since it only offers one way to access photos: by describing a rectangle of latitude and longitude coordinates, and fetching the [...]

Starbucks in Japan

Here’s a project I worked on, then forgot about. I used a screen scraper written in PHP to grab all the Starbucks locations in Japan to make a map. I wrote a batch geocoder to run the address results through Google Maps geocoder and recorded the latitude and longitude of each one.

With Japanese addresses, you [...]

Searching for a Japanese Telephone Number

I got a call from an unknown number on my Keitai but didn’t answer it. It looked like a business number with repeating parts (043-224-1010) and I knew that it was in Chiba by the first 3 digits. Being paranoid, instead of calling it back I went and searched on the internet. It turns out [...]

Google Maps Japan vs. Google Maps US

Using Google Maps to do geocoding of addresses in Japan and the US gives back much different results. Geocoding is when you ask Google Maps for information about an address. For example, you could search for “Empire State Building” and get back the address “Empire State Building, New York, NY 10001, USA” along with it’s [...]

Setting size and zoom level of maps

What I though was going to be an easy case of looking through the google maps API for a solution to bounds turned into a mammoth task today. I wanted a way to make the centre and zoom of a map change according to the points it contained, with the centre being the average of [...]