Obviously knowing the physical location of every computer is very important to the project. If it has not been provided by the participant, it must be estimated from the IP address of the computer.
Out of curiosity, what are the project\'s requirements in terms of this accuracy (100 miles? 10? 1?), and how accurate are people finding the estimated location?
I guess it might be possible to increase the accuracy by looking at the reported times of known seismic events and triangulating.
Mine was reasonably accurate - about 20 miles or so as the crow flies (estimate was Slough, which is where my ISP is headquartered, I\'m 20 miles due south of that).
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Mine was even closer- about 3/4 miles away.
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The location accuracy needed for the project depends on the number of sensors. The more laptop-sensors we have, the less accuracy we need. The errors will all wash out if we have enough sensors. We\'d really like the accuracy to be 1km or less, but understand that many will be mislocated by 10-40 km. We really do appreciate participants entering their locations. The better the location, the better the results will be!
Obviously knowing the physical location of every computer is very important to the project. If it has not been provided by the participant, it must be estimated from the IP address of the computer.
Out of curiosity, what are the project\'s requirements in terms of this accuracy (100 miles? 10? 1?), and how accurate are people finding the estimated location?
I guess it might be possible to increase the accuracy by looking at the reported times of known seismic events and triangulating.
Mine was reasonably accurate - about 20 miles or so as the crow flies (estimate was Slough, which is where my ISP is headquartered, I\'m 20 miles due south of that).
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We\'d really like the accuracy to be 1km or less, but understand that many will be mislocated by 10-40 km.
My two real positions were less than 2 km from my ISP\'s geoip estimate.
We really do appreciate participants entering their locations. The better the location, the better the results will be!
It took me more than 3 days to accidentally notice, that there is a possibility to manually enter computer\'s position. Maybe some note on a more prominent place (at a minimum any sticky thread in Questions and Answers : Getting started?) would be fine.
Peter
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Thanks Jesse, I must admit I\'m a little surprised that it has to be that accurate.
What kind of distance away from the epicentre could a laptop be and still pick up seismic activity. On a rough scale of eg magnitude 2, 5 and 8 quake?
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The IP guess was pretty far off for me - it pegged me as being in downtown LA, and I\'m in Riverside. Noting that, I\'ve just gotten in the habit of checking to see if the software still realizes I\'m at the location I set as \"home\" when I turn on the computer in the morning.
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A curious idea: once in a while (a hour, day, week, depends on number of attached hosts, DB load, etc.), the server could create a list of geolocations of actively listening machines. If this list (just a bunch of lat/lon pairs) could be occasionally downloaded along the recent quake data during a trickle, the graphics window could be able to visualize (or hide - per keystroke) the list as a set of green dots over the globe. (I\'m aware the list could grow huge over time... have the user opt-in to get it?)
Or have one daily/weekly generated world map with the listening hosts somewhere at the project page?
Peter
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The IP guess during my install (~April 22nd) was off my ~25 miles!! Showed downtown Sacramento and I\'m out in the foothills in Folsom.
My solution?
Quick zoom in Google Earth! Couple of keystrokes to establish my \"home\" location to +/- 10m.
Hope that helps...
Separate thought -- speaking of Google Earth and having just read the \"curious idea\" of Feb 9th re: worldwide \"green dot\" display.
As your project grows, perhaps the fine folks at Google Earth could provide a layer of QCN \"listening posts\"?
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