Saturday, September 6, 2008

Council Approves Plan Change

No surprise: http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/536641/2044170

With the plan change a sizable chunk of the airfield, including the area with all the hangars and control tower, the grass strip adjacent to the sealed strip, and I believe the eastern end of the field including what roughly appears to be the displaced threshold area are rezoned into various non aviation zonings.

I believe (although the document is hard reading) that almost all the sealed strip and immediate surrounds, right across to wigram road infact remains zone "A" for Aviation and the approach fans are in place still so technically it could still operate as an airfield, but naturally the developers can now use the fact that housing development will occur to basically the boundary as a convenient excuse to proceed with the shut down of aviation operations --- from there on it's a rubber stamp affair to get then remaining A zone changed into other zones (Living 1-3, Business, and Conservation) due to no aviation activity occuring.

Once again, the Christchurch City Council has failed the people who voted it in.  For shame those councillors who voted for a plan change to which the people you are tasked with representing are quite clearly against.

Whilst I'm certainly not one to give up without a fight, I'm not sure at this point there are any ways in which we could have an effect, with the plan change approved the council has I expect let the cat out of the proverbial and wouldn't be able to put it back even if it could be convinced to do so. 

I'm open to ideas though.
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Computerworld New Zealand has posted Rob O'Neill's interview with Amit Mital, Microsoft General Manager for Live Mesh. The interview was conducted during the Microsoft Tech Ed New Zealand 2008, in Auckland.

Other related articles o... (more in the full post)

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Today I've had a problem with access NZ sites through my TelstraClear cable connection, including geekzone.co.nz (I'm on 3G at the moment to post this) and even telstraclear.net.nz itself. So I decided I'd better ring the "help" desk and see what the story is. To cut a long story short, I present here a letter I will be sending to TelstraClear.

Update: TelstraClear just called me to inform the issue is fixed and the support person I spoke with last night will be receiving some remedial training.

To whom it may concern, I am writing to make a formal complaint in regards service received during a call to your help desk on the 27th of August 2008 at approximately 7:38pm, lasting 51 minutes.

I telephoned regarding an obvious routing issue on the TelstraClear network which made accessing many New Zealand websites inaccessible from my cable mode, including even telstraclear.net.nz itself, I have included traceroutes showing this.

I was on hold for approximately 40 minutes before I finally got to speak to a “technician”. I explained clearly what the problem was giving the ip addresses which were causing the routing issue multiple times.

The “technician” then proceeded to instruct me to “use these DNS servers”. Somewhat surprised at this suggestion, as I thought I had quite clearly described the nature of the problem, I explained to the technician that the problem was nothing to do with DNS and that I was able to resolve the domains in question perfectly, that the issue is a routing issue.

The technician again instructed me to “use these DNS servers”.

I asked the technician if I could email a traceroute to him to check, he replied I could and an email address was given to me.

I duly emailed the traceroute and the “technician” placed me on hold “while he checked something”. When the technician returned he, unfathomably, instructed me to “use these DNS servers”!

I proceeded to tell the technician AGAIN that the problem was nothing to do with DNS and asked him to please look at the traceroute I just sent to the address he specified.

He then told me that he could not look at this only a senior technician could. I asked to be put through to a senior technician, he told me there were no more senior technicians working.

I asked how this could be resolved, he again told me “try these DNS servers”! I told him that this was not the problem. He told me to email my details to that email address to have a senior technician look at the issue.

I asked how long this would take to be looked at, as the issue had now been going on for many hours and I had been on the phone for nearly an hour, most of that time on hold, and the technician had not be any assistance at all. He told me that “probably tomorrow”!

Eventually I became so fed up with the seemingly not-very-technical technician that I hung up in frustration as he was telling me yet again to try changing DNS servers.

As I write this the issue is ongoing, I still can not access www.telstraclear.net let alone other NZ based websites.

This letter is to be copied to www.geekzone.co.nz as I believe it is in the public interest to see what a complete shambles support at TelstraClear has become.

Yours Sincerely, James Sleeman

traceroute to www.stuff.co.nz (202.135.111.130), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 
1 192.168.10.1 (192.168.10.1) 0.838 ms 0.981 ms 1.131 ms
2 202-78-155-1.cable.telstraclear.net (202.78.155.1) 33.704 ms 33.791 ms 34.744 ms
3 ge-1-3-0-872-ie1-international.telstraclear.net (218.101.61.169) 22.572 ms 25.879 ms 25.992 ms
4 ae0-843.ie4.telstraclear.net (218.101.61.106) 36.203 ms 36.419 ms 36.308 ms
5 * * *
6 * * *
... 30 * * *


traceroute to www.telstraclear.net.nz (202.78.133.58), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.10.1 (192.168.10.1) 0.849 ms 0.972 ms 1.123 ms
2 202-78-155-1.cable.telstraclear.net (202.78.155.1) 15.570 ms 17.094 ms 17.472 ms
3 ge-1-3-0-872-ie1-international.telstraclear.net (218.101.61.169) 22.618 ms 25.412 ms 25.503 ms
4 * * *
5 * * *
...
30 * * *
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