I am tinkering with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery and making my first baby steps in a whole new horrible world of web development. I found out that the JavaScript IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2008 is broken out of the box. The error is:

Warning    2    Error updating JScript IntelliSense: jquery-1.3.2.js:
   Object doesn't support this property or method @ 2173:1

The fix for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 by Microsoft can be found here:

KB958502 – JScript Editor support for “-vsdoc.js” IntelliSense doc. files

After being a happy customer of NatWest (UK bank) for 4  years I think I’ve finally had enough.

Years ago when I came to the UK to do my BSc degree and Bulgaria was not yet a member of the EU it was a major pain to open a UK bank account. I talked to staff from Barclays, HSBC and NatWest. From all those 3 major banks only NatWest had reasonable conditions all the others had crazy stuff like depositing a lot of money and not being able to use them for 2 years or so. Today that’s no longer the case.

I’ve had good customer experience and they’ve always been polite and done what I’ve requested without wasting my time. E.g changing all my addresses (including Credit Card’s) they did in 5 minutes.

1. Bad things started happen about an year, year and a half ago about the time when Firefox 3.0 was released. Their ugly online banking system even today doesn’t support Firefox 3.0+. So my only choice was to use Opera on Linux.

2. One of my debit cards expired last month and I didn’t get a replacement at all. I had to waste time contacting the bank only to be told that if I haven’t received the card then it’s was sent to my old address (changed about one year ago) and that if I have changed my address in the last year they always send the new cards to the old address. WTF?

3. Last  years I switched to online statements. All good and green alright. However this month I badly needed official printed statements with my name and address on them as a proof of funds for post-study work permit. I went personally to the bank and requested they send me the printed statements. They said “No problem it will take 10 work days max, but usually only takes 2-3 days.“. 15 work days later with the statements not yet arrived I went again to my branch and asked what’s going on. “Sir, there is no record that you have requested the statements.” WHAT? And apparently it turns out there isn’t a single document they can provide me with that has my name and address on it. E.g. they can print my transaction history but it doesn’t have those details so it can’t be used as an official document. I needed those statements for next week god damn it. Requested them again and surprise surprise after 15 days I still haven’t received my statements and even if I do it’s already too late.

Screw you NatWest! I am switching banks the moment I get some free time…

Today was an amazing sunny day without even a single cloud in the sky. After so many depressing gray and rainy days I absolutely enjoyed drinking my coffee outside and then having a walk in the quite nice Pearson Park (in Hull).

I really wanted to take some photos so I grabbed my camera before going to the park. Unfortunately it just doesn’t work walking around thinking “I wanna take a shot of something, I wanna take a shot of something”. Inspiration and spontaneity are required. I took a couple of photos but those two were lacking so I just gave up and enjoyed just walking around.

Here is the only one that I liked. It’s nothing special but I like the dark green.

Trees in Pearson Park in Hull

Mono Victory Roar

Could also be interpreted as “Shit, the water is freezing.”

Some more photos from Cromer, UK:

I have just released version 0.3 of my PicasaWeb Uploader tool. The new things are:

• High quality batch image resizing/scaling on the fly prior to upload.
• Memory usage performance improvements.

Get it from (and also for more information): http://i-nz.net/projects/picasauploader

Photo Resize

I have just released version 0.2 of my PicasaWeb Uploader tool. The new things are “Send To” right-click integration on Windows and username/password saving. Get it from (and also for more information): http://i-nz.net/projects/picasauploader.

The Database templates in Visual Studio 2008 Team System are used to e.g. create automagic test data generation plans which then can be utilized in WebTests using a DataSource binding for a field value and then use the WebTests to create a LoadTest. It’s absolutely awesome and impressive how this is done in Visual Studio (only available in Team System edition).

The only little problem is that Visual Studio 2008 only ships Database templates for SQL Server 2000 and 2005. The Database templates for SQL Server 2008 are at: Microsoft® Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR R2 and require Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

A screencast on how to generate test data for a database at: How Do I: Generate Test Data using Visual Studio Team System Database Edition?

Before I begin with my rant I want to make it very clear that I am not an anti-Microsoft junkie and that I have been a happy user of Windows for a long time both in Virtual Machines and on real hardware.

I wasted most of my day with Windows Vista SP1 yesterday and ended up wiping it out and installing XP. I spent ages updating a fresh Vista install (had to reboot about 15 times after each windows update), installing and updating Visual Studio 2008 Team System and SQL Server 2008 Enterprise. Here is my rant:

• Vista was never designed for multi-tasking.
  • It’s dog slow even on my 3GB Ram, Intel C2D machine.
  • Doing more than 2 things at a time basically brings the system down to its knees.
  • Installing Windows Updates or performing any other intensive task resulted jittery sound while listening to music.
  • “Not Responding” is standard behavior one has to get used to.
• SQL Server 2008 SP1 + Visual Studio SP1 simply doesn’t work out of the box on Vista, but does on XP. All sorts of weird errors, named pipe problems and so on.
• Copying very large files (1GB+) from a shared folder results Explorer hang (”Not Responding”)
• and more and more and more…

Basically trying to do anything productive as a developer on Vista is shit. Back to XP.

This seems to have gone unnoticed but Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007 introduced native support for loading from and saving to the OpenDocument file format. So I went ahead and opened my OpenDocument final year project which is a 57 pages document with custom styles, formatting, frames, images, embedded diagrams and spreadsheets and more. The results was pretty bad and the resulting document was unusable for me. Basically only the text and bullet points were displayed properly and at least the following were broken:

• No page breaks.
• Wrong Frame size and placement, including caption
• Wrong image size and placement, including caption
• Extra spacing for Headings surrounded by borders
• Merge with next paragraphs ignored
• No embedded drawings/speardsheets.
• Table content placement not preserved.
• More quirks

I suppose for people who work with simple text documents the support for OpenDocument might be sufficient though. I for one am not going to rely on the ability to safely open my work documents with Word 2007 or such produced by Word 2007 in OpenOffice.

Who is to blame? Is OpenOffice not following the OpenDocument standard well or is it Word 2007 interpreting it badly? Gotta love standards! I am looking forward to see both office suits interoperating nicely together some day.

The test documents:

• Original OpenDocument Report ODT
• Original OpenDocument Report PDF
  
• Report Opened in Word 2007
• Report Re-Saved in Word 2007 and opened in OpenOffice

Some screenshots: