I had been searching for approximate frost dates for Auckland to help schedule veggie plantings. Luckily the people at NIWA are nice and respond very quickly to emails. I was told that ground frosts are days where grass minimum temperature are less than -1.0 degree C. Screen frosts are when the air temperature dips below 0.0 degrees C. […]

I had to create an ODBC datasource for an access database on my Windows 7 machine and for some reason the *.mdb driver doesn't show up in the control panel ODBC administrator.

After much swearing and google-ing I found the solution.

In C:\windows\sysWOW64 there is an executable called odbcad32.exe. You need to run this exe as administrator to gain access to all the ODBC drivers that come with Microsoft Office, etc.

Thanks Microsoft for another fine product!

With more and more people moving towards using a global DNS system (like Google DNS and OpenDNS) the speed advantages of a CDN may be cancelled out.

Most of the major CDNs use geotargeting based on where the DNS is being resolved from. For example Facebook's CDN solution (using Akamai) resolves static.ak.fbcdn.net to 210.55.501.200, a 5ms response time. Using Google's public DNS server (8.8.8.8) the same domain resolves to 72.246.43.42, 72.246.43.32, a 200ms response time.

So while using Google's DNS/OpenDNS may save a few ms while resolving a domain, it may slow down a site by putting the CDN pops further away from end users. Until CDN's can work with these public DNS providers the internet may become slower for those using these services.

We just recieved a couple of new computers today, shiny new Dell Studio XPS 435MT boxes. As everyone here still runs XP 32bit I decided to reinstall the new computers with the same OS, so we didn't run into any compatability problems. The problem is Dell doesn't support any other operating systems on these computers other than Vista 64bit!

The Webby Awards are upon us again for the 13th year. It's ironic though that awards that celebrate the best on the internet have one of the worst designed sites. The Webby People's Voice site is hard to register on and vote. This has discouraged a lot of people from voting for their favourite websites.

I had to find out the size of all our images on a site today. This was the easiest and fastest way to do it

find /home/username/public_html -name '*.png' -printf "%s\n"|awk '{sum+=$0}END{print sum}'

I've been battling with Webmin trying to get SSLv2 turned off so I can comply with Hackersafe/McAfee Secure.

For some reason Sixxs.net seems to be down. I'm unable to connect my IPV6 tunnels to their PoP's or connect to their website. Does anyone have any idea why they're offline?

Update: Seems to be back up now. It's safe to restart your aiccu now

For some reason the iPhone 3G will not connect to this wireless router. There has been talk that this is fixed in the latest firmware but as of writing this it is not fixed in the latest AU/NZ firmware (1.00.23).

I found a temporary solution for the problem though. If you limit your router to 802.11B only then the iPhone will connect without a problem. As soon as it's changed to mixed network or 802.11G only then it will fail to connect.

Update: I've found that the AU firmware from the AU linksys site works fine on the NZ WAG54Gv3. I'm using 1.00.46 and the iPhone 3G now connects under 802.11G without a problem.

TV3 reported on this the other night, but I can't find a link to the video clip. Apparently from July 1st, 2008 postcodes must be used when sending bulk mail to receive discounts. This is to force bulk mailers to move over to the new system which can be read easier by NZ Post.

According to the news clip residentual mail may also be affected by this change over. Mail can be lost in the mail system for months if the wrong/old postcode is used. Examples were given where there are ~18 Beach Rd's in Auckland. Using the correct postcode allows mail sorters to send your letter to the right one.