Ubuntu
namebench package

GoogleLocAPI can no longer be used to get Geodata

Bug #1381148 reported by jondee on 2014-10-14

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #1409849: Namebench fails to pinpoint my location. Edit Remove

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Namebench	Unknown	Unknown	auto-code.google.com-245 #256
	namebench (Ubuntu)	New	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

I'm new to NameBench so I'm not entirely sure what this data was for, but I can see that it's trying to get JSON data from an API that doesn't exist anymore. Apparently it was shutdown in 2012 (https://code.google.com/p/gears/wiki/GeolocationAPI). The issue is also referenced upstream here: https://code.google.com/p/namebench/issues/detail?id=256

Terminal error output shown below:

* Failed to use GoogleLocAPI: simplejson.scanner.JSONDecodeError Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) (content: <!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang=en>
  <meta charset=utf-8>
  <meta name=viewport content="initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, width=device-width">
  <title>Error 404 (Not Found)!!1</title>
  <style>
    *{margin:0;padding:0}html,code{font:15px/22px arial,sans-serif}html{background:#fff;color:#222;padding:15px}body{margin:7% auto 0;max-width:390px;min-height:180px;padding:30px 0 15px}* > body{background:url(//www.google.com/images/errors/robot.png) 100% 5px no-repeat;padding-right:205px}p{margin:11px 0 22px;overflow:hidden}ins{color:#777;text-decoration:none}a img{border:0}@media screen and (max-width:772px){body{background:none;margin-top:0;max-width:none;padding-right:0}}#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/errors/logo_sm_2.png) no-repeat}@media only screen and (min-resolution:192dpi){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/errors/logo_sm_2_hr.png) no-repeat 0% 0%/100% 100%;-moz-border-image:url(//www.google.com/images/errors/logo_sm_2_hr.png) 0}}@media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:2){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/errors/logo_sm_2_hr.png) no-repeat;-webkit-background-size:100% 100%}}#logo{display:inline-block;height:55px;width:150px}
  </style>
  <a href=//www.google.com/><span id=logo aria-label=Google></span></a>
  <p><b>404.</b> <ins>That’s an error.</ins>
  <p>The requested URL <code>/loc/json</code> was not found on this server. <ins>That’s all we know.</ins>
)
Failed to get Geodata: socket.timeout timed out

The application still works but it causes it to hang on start-up so maybe an easy solution is just to remove the code that does this looking up? Or alternatively supplement an alternative API!?

Tested under Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS and namebench 1.3.1+dfsg-2.