Thank you to johnson anyway - at least someone is awake, what an utter fool I am. I have written a ptr lookup tool for the ipad based on this service, as I don't have access to the low level routines required to do it properly. (If I were to learn Python and use Pythonista then that might be a different matter tho.)
I have put in a caching / memoization module so it does not go to the network every single time. It is very cheap though. The next stage would be to add lifetimes to the cache entries and do things properly, as they should be done.