Slightly offtopic - coordinate conversions

[Peter Sergeant]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 7:16 AM, Peter Sergeant <pete at clueball.com> wrote:

>  I've been playing around with Google Maps recently, and noticed that
> they've started using hashes of some coordinates:
>
> latlng: 52.54296  -0.308166
> hnear : 0x4877f21032e242f5:0x805cb103d71d5051
>
> latlng: 51.411586,-0.300893
> hnear : 0x47d8a00baf21de75:0x52963a5addd52a99
>
> A few attempts at working out how this was done with Perl have failed me -
> anyone got a better idea?
>

If anyone does work out how to reliably convert from the hnear part to
lat/lng coordinates, I'll happily donate £100 of beer money...

-P