Our heavitree office opening hours are as follows:

• Christmas Eve: 9am-3pm
• Christmas Day, Boxing Day : Closed
• New Years Eve: 9am - 3pm
• New Years Day: Closed

Emergency and out-of-hours services are still available on 01392 253770.

The announced reduction of VAT from 17.5% to 15% will affect all Switch invoices from Dec 1st onwards. This will not affect the majority of Switch business clients who already reclaim VAT, but smaller organisations and charities will be able to take advantage of our reduced rates.

HMRC have released a technical guide which answers many questions if you are a business applying the changes.

So the Xbox NXE launched tonight, and very impressive it is too - especially the amount of stuff you can do whilst in-game. The UI is very polished, and is a huge improvement. The avatar customisation is pretty good as well. Say hello to the virtual us!

Switch Systems are now officially 'approved by trading standards' , and are members of the Buy With Confidence scheme. What does this mean? Well, it just means that we're clear and honest in the way we conduct business, and that we have a commitment to excellent customer service!

I forgot to mention that I've uploaded our new 'laboratory' mini-site, where we'll be sticking scripts and bits of code that we hope people might find useful.

You can find it at lab.switchsystems.co.uk.

We've just launched our new campaign 'Grow With IT' - designed to showcase the benefits of IT to small-medium sized businesses in the South West who often do not realise what may be technologically possible!

Have a look around the site and tell us what you think.

We've recently been featured in the Express&Echo about our new work with Turntable, a charity which offers furniture to low-income families and people in need of support. Click the title to find out how we are helping to provide free comptuers.

After reading ArsTechnica this evening, i came across Ubiquity - a new mozilla labs addon for firefox which enables a commandline style interface into the web-browser. ideal for creating live mashups. This Video explains what it does fairly well:

As a webdeveloper, i've managed to do a few cool things using this, by utilising it's built in commands and by creating my own. Some notable built-in commands:

• delete - deletes the selected HTMl from the page you are viewing
• edit-page - places the page into edit mode, letting you change the content in real time
• syntax-highlight - Tries to syntax highlight any text you have selected

map-these looks like it will be really good when it's extended a bit, but isn't very useful right now.
I've made the following:

• php - searches the php.net website for the text you give it (i.e. try "php date")
• tinyurl - a simple extension of the demo tinyurl which gives you the URL in the preview window
• weatherforecast (work in progress) - an extension of weather which displays the next 5 days weather
• spell (work in progress) - checks spelling of text

Our office's Ubiquity commands will be uploaded to our new "Laboratory" website, which will be public soon...

Viruses in Space

The BBC Reports that Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS were infected with the Gammima.AG virus! As they don't have a direct internet connection, it is thought that the virus might have travelled via a flash or USB drive owned by an astronaut and taken into space. Doh!

Cool Space Tech

PC Pro blogs about the 'space cube', a 2inch cube that runs a 300mhz processor which boots redhat linux off of A CF card. Packed with ports (RJ45, USB, 3.5mm jacks, Serial, SpacePort and VGA to name a few), the compact metal chassis is remarkable and only draws 5W.

This King of the Cosmos is much too small. We would have preferred it bigger.

Microsoft's Photosynth technology has gone live! You'll need an 8.2mb browser plugin, but it's worth it!

SBS has gone RTM today! Nuff Said!

BT's Digital Vault service ends "Free" option

BT has said that it is no longer going to offer 2GB of free online storage, and will encourage users to take out their 4.99/month subscription for 50gb.

Google Apps outages bad for business

As posted on slashdot, Last week's google apps outages have reminded many sysadmins that even the mighty Google isn't infallible - we all think cloud computing and storage is great, but what happens when that cloud disappears..?

IPv4 available space dips below 1 billion

People have predicted that we've got about 3 years left before we are totally out of IPv4 addresses, which will push people onto IPv6 just in time for the london olympics. This years olympics are already available over IPv6.

Washington Uni and Microsoft have stepped it up another notch with this video, showing the ability to 'walk through' landscapes and orbit objects, with colour and aspect correction! It's intelligent walkthrough mode is simply amazing, the system automatically calculating the best path between two pictures/viewports based on available photos (so it will follow places people walk). Hard to explain, so just watch the vid!

This post on the joomla website says

A flaw in the reset token validation mechanism allows for non-validating tokens to be forged. This will allow an unauthenticated, unauthorized user to reset the password of the first enabled user (lowest id). Typically, this is an administrator user.

All 1.5.x installs prior to and including 1.5.5 are affected. To fix, upgrade to 1.5.6 or follow the instructions below:

in /components/com_user/models/reset.php,after global $mainframe; on line 113 add:

if(strlen($token) != 32) {
	$this->setError(JText::_('INVALID_TOKEN'));
	return false;
}