Oliver Jenkins

To stop those calls from companies who call you up to try to sell you something, you can try register your phone number with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). Registration is free, so its worth a shot. By law all companies must screen their numbers against this opt out list.

As they describe themselves

“The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is a central opt out register whereby individuals can register their wish not to receive unsolicited sales and marketing telephone calls. It is a legal requirement that companies do not make such calls to numbers registered on the TPS.”

Weather or not this stops companies from wasting my time, remains to be seen. However if any company does ring me now, I’m going after the £50,000 bounty - COMPANIES that plague consumers with nuisance silent calls will face fines of up to £50,000

To help make it a little easier, here is a link that takes you straight to the opt-out process.

Update: I’ve moved on a bit, and posted my latest version

I’m working on a small pet project at the moment that requires the content of a div to be ’scrubed’ around. Think the navigation with gmaps.google.co.uk but with any arbitry content.

With CSS you can easily allow an oversized child container to show part of its content through a parent container by setting its overflow property hidden. If the same property is set to auto or scroll then scroll bars can be used to navigate around the content.

To make the interface a bit more interesting I want to experiment with having the user click and drag the area around. Gmaps have shown that used correctly this type of interface can work well.

After a quick bit of coding here is my result so far.

• It only works in IE6 (as tested) need to get Firefox and other browsers working
• Their is some text highlighting problems with IE
• Some other small dragging problems
• I’m sure that somebody has done all the hard work, should take a look

I downloaded an installed IE7 Beta 2 to check if the site I look after was compatible (small risk, but a large impact if their was any problems). The site looked fine, but I never really got in to using IE7. Now I need to uninstall it, so that I can go back to a more stable IE6. I found the following uninstall instructions from the IE Blog. To uninstall Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview and return to Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP

1. Click “Start,” and then click “Control Panel.”
2. Click “Add or Remove Programs.”
3. Check “Show Updates” at the top of the dialog box.
4. Scroll down the list to “Windows XP – Software Updates,” select “Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2Preview,” and then click “Change/Remove.”

If “Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview” does not exist, run %windir%\$NtUninstallie7bet2p$\spuninst\spuninst.exe. You need to have “view hidden folders” enabled. %windir% is your Windows installation directory, which is normally ‘C:\Windows’ on most systems.Hope this helps - Oliver