The time was 4:24pm, the place was Wedgnock Rifle Range, the man was Danny Wade.

Yes, that’s right, our very own PHP Developer extraordinaire was crowned HeadShot Champion 2008 this past Wednesday at the inaugural CWCC Clay Pigeon Shooting Competition hitting a stunning 25 out of 30 clays.

Danny’s sterling effort wins him the admiration of his fellow co-workers, plus a princely sum of £30 from our pockets!

Full leaderboard

• 1st – Danny – 25
• 2nd – Carl – 24
• 3rd – Liam – 21
• 4th – Phil – 20
• 5th – Chris – 19
• 6th – Jim – 17
• 7th – Adrian – 16

Not the best of days at the office for yours truly. It’s going to be a long time until I live this one down!

It’s been several months in the making, but the new website for the QIA has finally been launched.

Our work included overhauling the site’s design, so as to provide a much cleaner, crisper feel that is more befitting of the agency’s values and traditions.

The overall site structure and layout also needed to be improved to better support the vast quantity of content, plus the site was required to be developed in accordance with strict government accessibility guidelines.

Our work on the new QIA corporate site follows on from the successful launch of the new QIA intranet last summer.

The UK government is currently considering plans to cut the internet access of people who go online and illegally download music and films. Initial drafts of the plans are suggesting that internet service providers would be required to take action over users accessing pirated material via one of their accounts.

However, the government has been quick to stress that these plans are currently at a very early stage and final proposals are yet to be confirmed. The illegal download market costs music and film companies millions of pounds in lost revenues with an estimated six million people a year downloading files illegally in the UK.

It has been suggested that broadband firms that fail to enforce the rules set out in this proposal could be prosecuted and the details of customers suspected of making illegal downloads made available to the courts. Some of the UK’s biggest internet service providers have been in talks with the entertainment industry over introducing a voluntary scheme for policing pirate activity, but no agreement has yet been reached.

The Internet Service Providers Association feel that the initial plans to use ISPs as something of a “net police force” have not been thought through logically, saying “Internet providers are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope.“

There is no doubt that the illegal downloading industry needs policing, but the main question remains how the government goes about doing it. Watch this space!