Apparently the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) caught a virus! According to The Register, it seems hackers uploaded malware infected files onto the podcast section of the CDC website. The site was taken down and, presumably, cleaned and inoculated before it was opened up again. And they say Americans don't get irony; well perhaps not on purpose...

Apologies for those who have commented that we haven't been eating our own dogfood by keeping *our* site updated often. We've been quite busy in a bit of an upgrade and migration project moving from one system to another. We thought it would be simple, and on paper it is, but the best laid plans and all that....

Many is the website that was coded and uploaded, saying exactly what the owner wanted to say....and hasn't been touched since. It's nothing more than a brochure for the person or organisation and if their message changes then they will change their website. We believe this is a fatal mistake in website management. There are two reasons for this: 1) people buy from human beings, not fancy slogans or the right typography and graphics, and 2) most people find sites via search engines and search engines LOVE dynamic (changing, or developing) content.

I got a bounced e-mail notice from a good friend who had tried to alert me to something on one of our sites (and not that our access control was out of control!). The e-mail he sent to us had bounced and he was worried something was up. I sent a couple of test e-mails which worked fine and let him know that everything seemed to be in order and to just re-send.

Great news out of Microsoft today* (am I really saying this? I shock myself sometimes...)! Microsoft has teamed up with Xensource to support Linux installations running as virtual machines on Xen virtualization software when it runs on top of a Windows server. I know that's a mouthful but it's significant in several important ways documented today on The Register.