Monday, May 30, 2005

MRTG 2.12.1 broke my graphs :(

I've been using MRTG to do network usage graphing for a long time and it's been a great, basic, free tool. But I recently upgraded to v2.12.1 and it appears to have broken some of my graphs :(

Usually I have the 2Mbit/s Frame Relay interfaces (on our WAN routers) set up to be unscaled, so that they top out at 2Mbit/s, which makes visualising the usage very easy. While the LAN interfaces I had scaled, so that the max of 6Mbit/s of traffic wouldn't dissapear into the 100Mbit/s of graph.

Now MRTG has decided to scale all the graphs and has got the max wrong for the LAN interfaces... so my pretty graphs are messed up... Threw the problem onto the MRTG list, I'll see what happens.

On the plus side, MRTG now support logrithmic scaled graphs, so small nuances in traffic don't get lost amongst the spikes! YAY! Time to update some of my configs.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

The Pentium 4 is dead...

Kudos to Tom's Hardware Guide for doing a great job of comparing Pentium M's with Pentium 4's and discovering that the Pentium M looks like it beats the P4 hands down in almost all benchmarks.

Turns out the P M has more in common with the old P3 than the P4.

The catch?  You need the CPU Upgrade Kit CT-479 from ASUS, which only works with some Pentium M processors and a small number of ASUS motherboards... But still a very cool (and quiet!) idea.

All this talk about AJAX

I seem to recall a collegue (Aidan Humphreys - no relation) and I, did some work in 1998/1999, that used JavaScript on the page to do dynamic updates of dropdown-lists.

The JavaScript called a Perl CGI backend into a propretry stock tracking system.

Maybe not as well defined as AJAX, but I'm sure we weren't the first in this arena.

We were working for CSK in Frankfurt at the time (I see they're now called Imagnos), using their Slinghot product.

Please tell me this is a joke!

Apple to addopt INTEL chips?

Right when both the leading next-gen consoles are moving to PowerPC and Apple wants to move away from it? I don't think so. Apple should be looking for ways to integrate the two new multi-core CPU's into it's computers, especially as console volumes will bring the price down!

And can anyone see OSX on PS3/XBox2 and/or PS3/XBox2 emulators on OSX?

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

StarWars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Well, just like most geeks, I headed off to see Episode 3 last night, down at The Berkley in Mision Bay. Nice little theater by the way (you can take your beer into the movies!)

I wasn't expecting too much of the film, having heard a mixture of reviews and seen a number of shorts. But in the end, I was quite impressed, heavy on the action (particularly lightsabre scenes), nice SPFX (mostly) and a good effort to tie things in with E4-6.

On the downside (or is that darkside?) Padamin still didn't age (but got pregnant quickly, while Anikin was away?), but Anikin does. Yoda's lipsync was abysmal (Back to muppets for Frank), the backgrounds were often blurry (may have been the focus on the projector) and the constant use of Tem Morrison was initally comical, but then I remembered he was cloned, Duh!

All-in-all a cool film, that needed seeing on the big screen. I wonder if there are any 1080i/p digital theaters in New Zealand?

XML document parsing in classical ASP

Unggg... The bain of my last two days!

I've gotten into the bad habit of coding ASP in VBScript, virtually all the XML examples are in JScript and C++. VBScript really isn't the place to be passing around Objects and either I've missed something (quite possible give MS's atrocious XML docs) or you end up doing nearly as much work as if the XMLDocument object didn't exist...

Oh well, just as well it was just some quick'n'dirty proof of concept code to interface between Tikit (taxonomy system) and Hummingbird's Portal. Time to hand it over to my assistant to code (properly) in Java.

[still need an HTML emailer for my PDA, so I can put links into these posts]

Friday, May 20, 2005

Updated my CV

Updated my CV recently (must update web one too...)
It's been about a year since I last did, aside from some training, couldn't really put anything of note in it... [sigh]

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Developing for Windows Mobile 2003 SE.... nearly...

Thought I'd help out and write some code for the PocketPC RSS feed reader that I use (PocketFeed). Downloaded the source... Fired up VS.Net 2003... project type unknown...

Darn it... need to load in all the PocketPC SDK and then I'll probably discover that I need to use VS v6 :)

UPDATE:
After much hacking, slashing, editing of paths, adding of libs, SDKs and patches...
PocketFeed compiles and runs on the PocketPC 2003 emulator (which is supposed to be Windows Mobile 2003 SE... [sigh])

Internet over gas!

10 Gigabit wireless, delivered over gas lines!
Can't see that arriving in NZ anytime soon...

BTW my first post via email, on my PDA/cellphone.

[edited: hmmm I need a way to do html emails from my PDA...]

Monday, May 16, 2005

SQL Error in ISA2004 install

Found a mistake in the ISA2004 install the other day.
If you want to log to a (MS) SQL DB, then you have to run a couple of SQL scripts against the DB you want to log to, then set up an ODBC connection.

It talks about giveing permission to a particular stored proceedure, only it doesn't exist...

Thanks MS. No response on the MS newgroups on that one...

Tax breaks for R&D in NZ, finally!

The government has finally come around to the idea that tax breaks for R&D are a good idea... even if they are only going half way!

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Craig joins the blogging world

OK, so I've been reading various blogs for a while now, mainly via RSS feeds to my PDA/cellphone, but figured it was about time to start my own.

I have no idea what will end up on here, it will probably get forgotten about quite freqently, but hopefully I'll at least put my Friday missives on here (jokes/interesting links).

Perhaps I'll even vent some vendor based anger on here too :)