I was listening to coverage of the Beijing Olympics on BBC Radio 5 Live this morning and it was interesting to hear what a spectator had to say about the lack of information that the Beijing organisers provide for spectators. One spectator was at the boxing and apparently there was no information about other events happening or results and, even more impressively, not even a schedule for the boxing either! I would have expected flat screens everywhere with the schedule or, at the least, a printed list.

Surely this is an opportunity for London 2012. With the vast amount of Content Management expertise across the UK, you'd think that we can put together some really great content solutions to give all the right information in the right places to the right people. Just imagine - TV coverage mixed with results screens and schedules... well put together, this could be the big differentiation between Beijing and London. OK, maybe we don't have flashy ceremonies, spectacular fireworks and an immersive cultural experience... but at least we love all sports and we can give a 'sports rich' environment for spectators.

Beijing is out to impress the world, but seems to have missed a trick by not giving spectators the information they need. Let's get this right in London.

I recently needed to get the NT user name from VBA code. Not a problem, Microsoft have an advisory note that tells you how to do that and there's a good summary of it on this post:

http://blogs.officezealot.com/charles/archive/2004/12/10/3574.aspx

However, there is a ptentially serious security problem with the other method that Charles suggests on that post - using the environment variable like this:

Environ("USERNAME")

If you are using the username check in VBA for security purposes (for example, matching a username against a list of known users permitted or restricted on some actions) then the method above does not guarantee that the actual username of the logged on user will be returned.

The user can override the default username setting by adding a new environment variable (Control Panel -> System -> Environment Variables) called USERNAME and setting it to whatever they want. Effectively, they are taking the identity of another user as far as the variable is concerned, and anything that looks it up.

It is therefore safer from a security perspective to use the Win32 API call. Note that if you are doing security in VBA you have a bit of a problem anyway though because even if you password protect you code, it's easily crackable.