David Currie

A plug for a site put together by a Hursley colleague and his brother. Zamzar provides free online file conversion. Upload a document, image, video or music, select the type of conversion, enter your e-mail address and click convert. After a short delay you get an e-mail back with a link to your converted document.

The DVLA have finally joined the 21st century and I’ve just purchased a new tax disc online. Shame that the big yellow box on the front of my renewal form didn’t contain the required reference number but holds an advert for buying online instead. Fortunately, with the reference number from the vehicle registration certificate and a license plate number it was able to find the necessary records. The system doesn’t quite deliver on the “quickly” part of the advert – only after you’ve paid does it tell you that it may take up to five working days for the disc to arrive. Shame the current one expires on Tuesday!

Firefox 2.0 may not be due for official release until tomorrow but it’s on their FTP servers today. As you might expect, the main server is taking a battering so I’d suggest UK folks try a local mirror. Nice touches are the search box which dynamically suggests terms, new pages opening on tabs by default and inline spell checking. Best of all though, all of my add-ons updated successfully! One interesting point is the support for the WHATWG specification for storing and persisting state client side, something that is increasingly important for Web 2.0 applications.

Skype have an interesting offer for six months free calls to UK landlines if you buy £10 of SkypeOut credit. Presumably it’s an attempt to persuade people to use VOIP for all of their calls. Unfortunately the free calls also have to originate from within the UK otherwise I’d be tempted.

I took the plunge and installed IE7 after it was released yesterday, safe in the knowledge that, with various bugs being reported already, there is always Firefox. (Check out http://www.ie7.com/!) Initial thoughts are pretty positive but I’m not ready to switch yet (at least until I see what Firefox 2.0 has to offer).

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ADSL Max finally arrived in the Currie household yesterday. Currently it appears to have decided that the best we’re going to get is 3 Mbps and a speed test this morning came out at just under 2 Mbps. If I find time over the weekend I may experiment with the BT speed tester service to see if removing the 15m extension cable on which the modem currently sits makes a difference. It could just be that we’re a long way from the exchange though. Still, it’s a lot less painfull than the 3G card I’ve been using all week!

The Register reports that IE7 is due to be released later this month. The pressure is on for Firefox, with Release Candidate 2 of Version 2 released last week.