• NHI's uses the letters A-Z without I or O.
• NHI's start with three letters and end with four numbers.
• The last digit is a checksum.
• NHI's are assigned randomly. I believe hospitals have distinct sets ready to be assigned.
• Its possible for somebody to have multiple NHIs (first alphabetically is the primary).

The current Id. structure only allows for around 13.8 million NHI's. With a population of around 5 million in 2019 and the possibility of a single person being associated to multiple Id.s, I suspect NHIs in their current form wont be around very long.

References

(last checked 2023-06-06)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHI_Number
2. https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/health-identity/national-health-index
3. http://www.midcentraldhb.govt.nz/PatientsandVisitors/GeneralInformation/Pages/NHI.aspx

[EDIT]: Thanks to Chris W for pointing out a bug in my previous implementation. If the checksum is a '0' before being subtracted from 11, the NHI number is deemed to be invalid. This is now fixed in the generator.

Using an old phone (Nokia N900) I have set up a webcam to take a photo every 5 minutes during the day and upload it to my website. You can see the latest photo on: Webcam

I have set my computers desktop background to sync with the latest photo too. So far I have a years worth of images and have made a few time-lapses. Here is one over a couple of days:

I have a small personal website, as you can see, that gets the odd visitor now and then. This makes me happy! so I like to know about it. There are plenty of statistic gathering scripts like Google Analytics that generate excellent aggregate data, but for my scale of website I prefer a more fine-grain monitoring. I use BBClone for this and it does an awesome job. Other than wishing it had the option for a SQL back-end, I always thought it would be great to have a real time notification of someone paying a visit.

Thus my java ApacheLogNotifier was born!

Using Java and Ubuntus port of NotifyOSD via the notification demon, I have created a small program to poll the tail of my Apache log and notify me whenever there is interesting activity. At the moment I ignoring localhost and bots, so that I can see if an actual person has just come to visit my website. There is a lot of work and refactoring to be done. My initial prototype is just a rushed couple of hours work (thanks to reusing the tail code from http://www.informit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=java&seqNum=226).

For more information and to get the code look at the wiki page.