I believe that bannering, along with other coding standards, makes code more approachable and therefore more valuable. It especially helps with maintenance and re-use, where the current programmer may not be the original developer. Making code more approachable is important to commercial organisations looking to maximise their return-on-investment (ROI). However, such standards tend to be derided by developers who predominantly work on their own because they cannot see the value.

I remain concerned about the possibility of "taking out" a Microsoft Exchange server, especially one installed as part of Small Business Server.

According to a news article being carried by the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5041848.stm), a group of hacker have hit a web site operated by the Swedish police.

It seems that this was simply a denial of service attack, which swamped the machine with requests.

Unfortunately, denial of service (DoS) attacks seem to be becoming more prominent and I suspect we will soon need to be helping smaller clients ensure that their boundary devices are capable of withstanding such attacks.

I suspect it will also come as something of a shock to people when they learn how expensive some of these security devices are in comparison to "bog standard" equipment.

Well, we finally published our new web site (which can be viewed at http://www.rrs.co.uk) at 4:30pm today!

It's been hard work, but hopefully worthwhile!

Although this is "billed" as an interim before we publish the larger .NET site, it still clocks in at 302 files spread over just under 70 pages.

I've had a quick look at some of the available material on the forthcoming Microsoft Office 2007. What concerns me is the lack of menus. Although I confess to not having spent enough time with the actual betas to make what might be considered an informed opinion, I am still concerned!

As far as computing-related crime, the Police and Justice Bill, which was published last week, is at least a step in the right direction.

Thoughts on the 20th Anniversary of PC Viruses

My thoughts on the United Kingdom's travel problems.

Well, we managed to produce our annual calendar on time and to distribute it to many of our clients and other worthy recipients.

It is, as always, a huge undertaking and is always accompanied with the almost mandatory raft of problems. This year we were plagued by problems with the Adobe PDF Distiller package, meaning we ended up being left with little time to get the PDF proofs back to our printers so they could print them.

What was so damned annoying was that we actually started the design process much earlier than usual, but it was still just as much a rush as normal!

I have decided to join the growing number of people who 'blog' - that is, who keep a 'web log'.

I'm not sure how successful I am going to be! My intention is to try and blog a couple of times a month on subjects that interest me within information technology and hopefully are of interest to a slightly larger audience than just myself!

Blogging is certainly a growing phenomenon and one which I suspect will soon reach the mainstream.