Comments for Noodles' Blog

Comment on New Zealand Postcode Database by gerard

gerard — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:25:41 +0000

Our company, hscr, is a survey research company which specialises in surveying hospital and GP patients about the quality of care they have recently received. Each fortnight we send out 500+ letters to Auckland patients and in addition when we have special projects we may need to send thousands of questionnaires to people all over NZ.
The new postcode system is great except that even when we have an Excel file of all the postcodes (Thanks a million noodles!!! I am happy to pay a small contribution to your efforts!) we still need a macro that looks at the columns of addresses that we have and assigns the correct postcode - of course our addresses have all kinds of different formats and abbreviations (”ave”,”rd”, etc.) Is there such a macro available somewhere?

Comment on DNS Stuff/DNS Report Alternative by n3ddy

n3ddy — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:19:08 +0000

I have just discovered http://w3dt.net/ which is an Australian DNS testing site, which has all the tools of dnsstuff.com and is 100% free.

Comment on iPhone 3G and Linksys WAG54G v3 incompatibility by John

John — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 10:13:58 +0000

Hi There,

I had the same problem, and also upgraded the firmware which seemed to fix the iphone connectivity, but I have since noticed poor connection to the internet through the router and rang my provider, they told me that it has been dropping out regularly since July 11th (iPhone day) and also the day that I upgraded the firmware.

Has anyone else had this issue.

Thanks

Comment on New Zealand Postcode Database (V2) by Richard

Richard — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:51:23 +0000

I haven’t yet downloaded the database as ive maxed out my data for the month and doing so will be painfully slow. But if the accuracy of this database is slightly out i just want to suggest how easy it would be to extract the info from publicly available pdfs using basic text parsing.

For instance from post code directory pdfs simply select all text and dump to plain text file, then parse.

Its very easy as the “junk” text such as “please visit our website..” is repeated in large blocks throughout the document and can be easily stripped out in a matter of seconds.

That will leave u with some nice blocks of text starting with “Lobby Name Box/Bag Range Postcode”, “Postcode Listings – Urban Areas ” and “To check that an address is serviced by Rural Delivery” that you can use to change parsers for a specific post code type.

If you look at the plain text dump you’ll see that RD parsing is a piece of cake as are boxs and bags (lobby/start/end/post code). Its a very basic 3 columns format. Very simple.

Urban addresses look complicated but they are not if u consider that all New Zealand address fall into about 12 categories (streets/roads/lanes/etc). So when parsing the text for urban addresses just check and compare against these. If the word your on is one of these categories then you know uve just hit then end of a street, from there u should be expecting a suburb/town, so if u hit a numeric digit instead of a letter then you know you got a street range, then after the suburb/town the next series of digits is the post code.

So the logic to parse the documents from NZ Post is very very simple, although given the copyright probably illegal. I estimate maybe 2-3 hours of coding and you’d have the whole database in 100% accurate form straight from the horses mouth so to speak.

Comment on New Zealand Postcode Database (V2) by Chris

Chris — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:20:34 +0000

I notice that there are roughly 360 unique postcodes in your CSV file. Having spoken to NZ Post, I understand that NZ actually has over 1600 unique postcodes. Am I doing something stupid?

Thx.

Comment on iPhone 3G and Linksys WAG54G v3 incompatibility by David

David — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:36:12 +0000

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. This was driving me mentally insane! Firmware upgrade worked + got some bonus features on my router

Comment on iPhone 3G and Linksys WAG54G v3 incompatibility by Nick MacKechnie

Nick MacKechnie — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 08:50:36 +0000

Hey dude,

I have a WAG54g V3, and I’m running 1.00.63 if you want a copy of it.

Comment on DNS Stuff/DNS Report Alternative by Frank

Frank — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:54:18 +0000

Hey Guys!
I want to report a new full feature site:
http://www.dnsqueries.com

their functionality “domain health check” is a perfect reproduction of dnsreport features.
Regards

Comment on New Zealand Postcode Database (V2) by Peter

Peter — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:47:00 +0000

I am using your info via the Zip Codes application on my iPod Touch. There seems to be large gaps in the information. I have noticed that all postal codes between 3225 and 3300 are not there - ours is 3288. They are missing from the CSV file on your site.

Will be very useful.

Comment on iPhone 3G and Linksys WAG54G v3 incompatibility by Paul

Paul — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:58:44 +0000

Thank you so much for this post.

You have finally put an end to 4 days of resetting, restoring, reading support articles, reading dozens of forum posts on “ipod touch 2.0 wi-fi problems” …..

i upgraded the router firmware and it all works fine.

thanks again!