Rapid Web News

A recent automated update to McAfee Anti-virus software caused the software to mistaken detect a key Windows system program as malicious and move it out of its proper location to a McAfee anti-virus quarantine. Due to the critical nature of the quarantined system program, ‘svchost.com’, affected computers failed to start correctly and were sent into a rebooting loop.

According to Microsoft, the affected file ‘is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries’.

McAfee responded to the problem by withdrawing the definition update and later releasing a clean one. The security giant also published advice on how to manually fix affected computers. The influx of interested parties trying to look up this advice through McAfee’s forum caused the site to become unavailable for a short time on Wednesday evening.

Source: The Register

McAfee had the following to say on the matter.

McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to this release. Corporations who kept a feature called “Scan Processes on Enable” in McAfee VirusScan Enterprise disabled, as it is by default, were not affected.
Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The faulty update was quickly removed from all McAfee download servers, preventing any further impact on customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumers.

We recommend the use of ESET Anti-virus products including NOD32 Anti-virus and the Smart Security Suite. If you are interested in a secure, reliable anti-virus and computer security solution for you business, please feel free to contact us for more information.

The Moira Fund, a grant making charity, has been established in memory of Moira Jones,

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Following her death, family, friends and colleagues of Moira wished to establish a fund in her memory that would support others who found themselves bereaved through violent death at the hands of another.

Rapid Web have worked with the Moira Fund to produce a custom web design built upon the well established, open-source blogging platform, WordPress. The custom design was integrated into the WordPress system with images provided by the Moira Fund and involved the creation of a custom events administration and management plug-in.

Rapid Web has sponsored The Moria Fund and continues to wish them the very best in all their future fund-raising and support efforts.

To donate or find out more information about The Moria Fund, please visit The Moria Fund website.

At Rapid Web, we are very happy to announce the launch of the Grinnall Cars website!

Grinnall Cars manufactures specialised sports cars, trikes and kit cars, from the Scorpion III, IV to the BMW 1200CL. I would be lying if I said they did not look like tempting purchases!

For Grinnall Cars, Rapid Web put together a custom web design which was then integrated into a custom developed website. Each product featured on the Grinnall Cars website, has several related information pages and a full dynamic photo gallery.

The Grinnall Cars homepage also features a custom made Flash banner, created by one of our excellent in-house Flash developers and previews several of the top products from Grinnall Cars. The Flash animation features many aesthetically appealing visual effects such as focus blur which compliments the design and provides additional promotional information without overly distracting the end-user.

If you are interested in website design, development or Flash animation development, please feel free to browse our portfolio – Grinnall Cars being one of our newest additions!

If you wish to, please feel to get in contact with us and discuss exactly what you’d like!

Here at the Rapid Web offices, we all like cake. Rightly so as well, because cake is fantastic.

On a related note, we’re deliciously happy to announce the launch of the ‘Love at First Bite Cakes’ website.

Here’s a quick snippet from the website describing the personal history of Love at First Bite Cakes.

A lot of people ask me if I’ve been to college to learn my skills, but my training was more traditional… I’ve learnt them through the family business! Just before I was born my parents opened Parkside Bakery, which they owned until about 5 years ago. Most of my happiest childhood memories are being there, cleaning and helping make the cakes. When I finished school I began working at their shop in Stafford hospital making all the shop cakes (flapjack, shortbreads etc) and got creative by changing recipes and design. Eventually I moved to their main bakery as head of confectionary, helping with all food production and started making birthday cakes, with help from my dad.

Seeing how interested I was in celebration cakes, and once showing me everything he knew, he sent me around the country for a year, working for the countries top cake decorators and chocolatiers. Therefore my training was informal and experienced based. In 2006, they opened a cafe in Stafford town which I became manager of. The shop before used to sell a lot of birthday cakes, so I had a small base of customers asking me to make cakes for them, and from there my cake business grew. Within a year I had enough customers to call cake decorating a full time job!

In recent years, I have been looking for the perfect shop to move my business into, and start on my own officially, and I got the keys last week. I open ‘Love at first Bite’ in two weeks time and I can’t wait! I’ll let you know the rest as it happens…

The Love at First Bite Cakes website is a fully custom web design and template based on a provided logo which was well integrated into the desired colour theme and style. The website promotes some fantastic celebration style cakes primarily and the custom web design reflects this target audience.

We also gave Love at First Bite Cakes business specific advice in the web presence promotional fields of social networking and social media, meaning you can now follow them on Twitter, Facebook and soon flickr.

If you’re interested in putting together a fantastic website to promote your business or if you just want some advice on how to promote your existing website, feel free to get in touch. There is a lot we can help you with - take a look at our portfolio.

Rapid Web – turning cake into code.

WordPress, the super popular open-source content management and blogging software has recently gone into beta. Version 3 of WordPress looks to bring many new features to the system including a revamped administration system and the ability to deploy a network of WordPress powered blogs simultaneously on the same domain in either seperate directories or subdomains.

WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 also comes with a new default blog them called Twenty Ten which comes with custom background and header options built-in.

The official WordPress development blog gives the following information about what to expect in WordPress 3.0.

You Should Know:

• The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved, but we didn’t want to hold things up for this one screen. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.
• The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.
• We’re still fiddling with a few small things in the UI, as we were focused on getting the more function-oriented code finished first. For example, we’re getting a new icon for the Super Admin section.

Things to test:

• Play with the new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.
• Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up. It’s really easy to add new types, so do that and see how it looks!
• WordPress MU users should test the multiple sites functionality to make sure nothing broke during the merge.