Because of a recent problem I am taking the tram to work for a three month period. It gets pretty boring on public transport. There are only so many Greg Egan books to be read, and staring into space doesn't appeal to me. Fortunately I have an Asus eeepc running Ubuntu Linux. It is a light, compact laptop with good battery life.

Going to work one day through Fitzroy I opened the network interface menu from NetworkManager and noticed that I had ten or twenty wireless access points within range and that some of them had pretty funny names. So I started to research ways of getting a list of AP names from a script and within a day or so I had written wifi-scanner. A couple of more days of debugging (going to and from work) and I had some results worth publishing. The output from the script is available in this file. If you dig deeper in that repository you will see that wifi-scanner uses mercurial to record the history of changes to that file. These changesets can give you some idea of the geographical relationship between access points.

Unique access points are identified by their MAC addresses. The first column in the file is the number of unique access points with that name. High numbers are shown at the top of the file. You can see that NETGEAR is a very popular access point name. Low numbers down the file show some less common access point names. There can be only be one BoomZilla or Internet Death Virus for example.