After years of mucking around with radios and a stalled attempt to get an advanced amateur radio license, I got talked into taking the foundation license study/exam session run by Amateur Radio Victoria. The foundation license is a newish class of amateur radio license that allows the operator to use up to 10 watts transmitter power on:

• 3.5 - 3.7 MHz (80 metres)
• 7.0 - 7.3 MHz (40 metres)
• 21 - 21.45 MHz (15 metres)
• 28 - 29.7 MHz (10 metres)
• 144 - 148 MHz (2 metres)
• 430 - 450 MHz (70cm)

For those interested in starting out with radio communications, you should check out this course. It’s great for people with no previous experience, and a great way to get on air.

From ICANN’s blog entry:

This is advance notice that there is a scheduled change to the IP address for one of the authorities listed for the DNS root zone. The change is to L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET, which is administered by ICANN.

The new IPv4 address for this authority is 199.7.83.42.

This change is anticipated to be implemented in the root zone on 1 November 2007, however the new address is operational now. It will replace the previous IP address of 198.32.64.12.

While this won’t cause any failure of DNS, such migration is usually an interesting one - with some ‘retired’ IP addresses still receiving DNS queries some 10 years after retirement. There are a number of root DNS servers - and most DNS server software will ask any root server it can for a list of current root DNS servers and then use them. It’s always nice to update your root.hints file however. You can do this using: dig @a.root-servers.net . ns > db.root (and move/substitute db.root for the correct file/location on your system).

Cisco have released version 8.3.3 (registration required) of software for 7941 and 7961 phones. There are still a number of known bugs, however a number of issues that I saw on a regular basis seem to be fixed. The release notes detail the changes in this version.

As some of you probably already know, I’m starting the process to move away from IT and into aviation as a full time career.

Flying has always been something that I loved - even as a kid, and given the way the aviation industry is screaming for pilots, now is a great time to have the whole mid-life crisis and change careers.

Wow is there a lot of medical things to be done! At least I know why pilots never seem to die on the job (well, without making a mess on the ground :))…

I’ve passed my first medical yesterday… Urine tests, basic vision, colour blindness, reflexes, etc etc. Today is the ECG, blood tests, etc etc, tomorrow is the hearing test, and on the 1st of November, I go to have the back of my eyeballs inspected. It’s pretty full on!

A lot of places have carried stories lately about issues in Excel 2007 where it fails at simple maths.

The original newsgroups report is here. Microsoft has published a bit of an explanation, but I don’t think they have yet grasped the root cause of the problem. Some posts are showing clearly conflicting information with what Microsoft is stating with issues such as the following in Excel:

1
2
3
4

A1 =850*77.1   --> 100000
B1 =A1+1       --> 100001 (really a display bug???)
C1 =A1-1       --> 65534
D1 =B1-C1      --> 2

This could have quite a number of effects in people who rely on Excel to do business. No fix is currently available. Excel 2003 and earlier are not affected, nor is OpenOffice.