A fantastic site for geocoding addresses - and it's free:

The example below is taken from the list of Lloyds TSB and Cheltenham & Gloucester branches that will be transferred to the Cooperative Bank under the Big Branch Sell-Off. A full explanation of the story can be found here. However, it took less than 10 minutes to create the example map below.

View Lloyds TSB, Cheltenham & Gloucester Branch Sold in a full screen map

As you may already now, being a customer of the ITD gives you realtime access to view what's going on with your network.

The simple layout of the monitoring page in the Client Area may be familiar to you (see below). But now you can also see how your network is performing, and critically for how long. A new graph has been added to each monitored device showing it's Uptime.

The Uptime graph demonstrates the availability of the device and keeps tracks of planned (and unplanned!) system restarts/reboots. Any interruption to the service results in a high-priority email being sent to the ITD (and your email address if requested), so we can both keep on top of any problems and be alerted to any issues (such as power cuts) as they happen.

Here is an example of the Uptime stats. At the moment, you can see the Y-axis is measured in days and hopefully will reach 100+ before any issues are reported.

If you would like to know more about the ITD's monitoring, or have any questions about the existing graphs available to you - please get in touch.

I decided to create this post after spending a while figuring out what Microsoft had done with RDP (or Terminal Services) in Windows 7.

The feature that enables you to connect to your PC from anywhere and work from your familiar desktop has been available to anyone running installations of XP/Vista/7 Professional or above.

If you're reading this post, you may have already come across the problem of RDP being disabled in the Home editions of the OSes mentioned above. There is help, however, in the form of a (genius) patch. Several of the patches you can find in various forums/tech blogs address the lack of this feature in Windows 7 Home Premium before Service Pack 1. But attempts to apply the same patches to updated installations produce an error.

After hunting high and low, I found two sources for similar patches that work on Windows 7 SP1.

For Windows 7 users, here is the zip file that contains install.cmd (to be run as Administrator). It accepts command line switches, such as 'multi' (to enable multiple users) and will restore RDP to its useful state of accepting connections. This is an essential feature which should be available to everyone and not just those those that have Business or Professional editions. And given that so many of the early versions have been broken by SP1, I thought I'd make a working version available here.