Planet Nomad now receives UK Highway traffic feed

www.planetnomad.com now receives UK highways traffic data - detailing all problems on the major routes in the UK. If you're a registered user planetnomad will send you an email every morning listing problems along your route into work.

I'll be looking into SMS reporting soon. That would be rather cool for some. I generally check emails before txts so emails came first.

Installing MySQL ODBC Connector 3.51 on win64

There's no installer for this so the easiest way of installing is unpacking it to c:\Documents and Settings\User and run your Dos prompt. Once there run "Install.bat 0" and it'll work like a charm.

Replacing double quotes in VB strings

If you're forced to use VB and some of us occasionally you'll end up at some point wanting to get rid of the double quotes in a string. More as a note to myself this one but here's the help..

The way to do that is replace instances of " with "".
Sample code -

Dim str As String = "I ""love"" VB"
Console.WriteLine(str)
Console.WriteLine(str.Replace("""", ""))

now relax, job done, compile and move away.

What is Social Media?

My good friend Ruth has a piece on Social Media here. Well worth a read with plenty of references of how we're all exchanging info these days. Personally i use a pigeon. He's reliable and cheap to run on birdseed.

Setting up an email server at home on a dynamic IP address

Being a tight arse i was hoping for a free way of doing this but ended up paying a little to get this working. Here's the situation: i'm on BT broadband in the UK and all their dynamic IP addresses are blacklisted automatically. But i want to run a smtp server at home which will spit out emails once a day to users of my beta site: www.planetnomad.com when they request it.

I purchased a Mail Outbound service (from dyndns.org) and Postcast Professional Server - $15 a year and £48 respectively. Postcast allows you to enter a Smtp gateway server which will act as a hop to get your emails out there. Dyndns gives you the server details and once entered you can create emails and send them to your heart's content.

www.planetnomad.com is a google map app. that will send out emails to users notifying them of new information in a specified location. For me, i've got it sending out emails detailing new stories from Reuters news service that occur every day in Europe. To try it yourself just register and set up a favourite view.

Launchy and Winamp

Just got back into using Launchy - the Silverlight of the XP world. Found that it won't work with mp3 files (i'm using winamp in this case) if the media library is a named computer on the same network. You'll have to map a drive letter to the library first and then use that. Then Alt-Space and you're away.

Lifehacker has a great article on tweaking Launchy for twitter, amongst others, here.

Wikipedia on yer phone

Google Mdict and Wiki.mdk (the 120Mb reduced wikipedia). Chuck them on your phone and hey presto you can win most arguments down the pub.