Chris May

Here are a few threads of people who like me have found that their brand new bluetooth devices (that they got at the apple store no less) won't allow you to hear your voicemail with the new iPhone 2.0.

One has to wonder.... why does Apple do this crap?

Why don't they just give us a cut and paste function?

Why don't they make the speaker phone louder?

Why don't they let you open links in a new window?

Frustrating...

When it comes to Apple and quality software, stuff like this is just par for the course:

Have I mentioned how much I don't like working with Macs?

I have some friends who like them, so I won't go as far as some Mac fanboys to claim that Macs suck and everyone is better off with an XP computer (but that is pretty much how I feel).

I bought a Mac for my wife a year ago, because at school there are still people emailing around clarisworks files, and from time to time we want to do something that would require accessing a shared folder on the network.

Problem is: it never works.

"The alias ServerName could not be opened because the original item cannot be found"

Searching google turned up 101 different ways to connect to a network share, and they all failed in different ways.

Last nigiht I found myself trying to get it to work once again, but this time I happened across a solution.

After hours of wasting my time, I finally found the solution here.

Windows 2003 Servers encrypt their communications, Macs can't deal with this.  Problem solved.

The world is full of idiots.

Because so many of these people have wrecked their servers by accidentally installing malware, MS now feels they have to force hightened security on the rest of us.

So I have wasted 30 minutes trying to get an activeX control installed on a server.

IE won't let me do it, even though I marked the site as Trusted, and even though I went through every ActiveX option in advanced tools and turned them all to Enabled.  Nope, still nothing.

I then decided to try changing the default security levels... oh wait, they won't even LET me do that.  Are you kidding me??

I finally found a link to download an install.

Now IE tells me "Your security settings do not allow this file to be downloaded."

Do I seriously need to go install firefox to just get this damned flie downloaded??

No, because thankfully I was able to open up the page source and go find where the activeX is getting pulled from, and realized it was coming from a different subdomain (which of course is not apparnet to any normal users).

Adding that subdomain manually to my trusted sites fixed the problem.

The whole thing is just stupid.

Most internet providers for businesses offer some kind of SLA to show their commitment to continued uptime.

One of my customers who uses AT&T Business DSL recently had a multi day outage. 

So what does AT&T's SLA provide?

Customer connectivity shall be restored in 24 hours or less from the time AT&T is notified of the outage. *Customer shall be entitled to one (1) day's credit (based on 30 day calendar month) from the Customer's recurring monthly service fees if AT&T fails to meet the 24 Hour Service Restoration SLA.

Yes you read that right.  Your business has no email or internet access for 3-4 days and what does AT&T do for you?  They might knock 10 bucks or so off your bill.  How nice... well at least they don't make me waste any more time .... oh wait..

(*) Credits are not automatically applied. Customer must apply via the Business DSL SLA website located at http://www.att.com/businessdslsla, or by calling our Customer Care at 1-877-722-3755.

Wow. 

I am still not sure who to blame on this...

Is Comcast packet shaping Netflix, or is Netflix just not able to provide enough consisten bandwidth?

I'm leaning toward Comcast as being the problem behind this, but I haven't been able to fully verify it.

I have bandwidth to spare:

But netflix doesn't seem to like it:

People love Apple, and they love iTunes, but I continue to believe that iTunesis the worst piece of widely used software out there.

Today I was trying to add a podcast to iTunes, and like months before, I ran into the problem of not being able to find anywhere that I could click to add a podcast.

It seemed the only way to add a podcast was to do so through the iTunes store.

Last time I gave up and was lucky enough to find the podcasts I wanted through iTunes, but this time the one I wanted to add wasn't listed there (or at least I couldn't find it).

After even more searching I finally found how to do it.  You need the URL as a link, and then you need to drag the link from your browser window, onto the "Podcasts" navigation link that is on the left hand side of iTunes.

Totally... stupid.  There is no other way to describe it.

I am having a very hard time using my iphone headphones outside these days in Chicago.  It gets pretty cold, and the plastic that they wrap the wires in freezes up almost instantly, making the cable stiff like a piece of solder.

So when you turn your head, the headphone wires don't move and the ear buds pop out of your head.  Pretty poor design.

I guess it doesn't get this cold in Silicon Valley, where Apple has it's headquaters.

Since moving from my old Rev 0 Verizon card, to the new Rev A built in EVDO card in my new Lenovo laptop, I have had a lot more problems with my service.

It could be that with my old setup, I could simply tell the network adapter to connect and it would take care of dialing out and setting up the connection.  In other words, I didn't have to go through VZ Access Manager.

But now, I am forced to use VZAM, and I have to say, I think it pretty much sucks.

In the last 10 minutes, here are 2 wonderful issues I have run into:

I have had this several times recently... my friend Pete who works a lot with this stuff told me that Error 913 ... "It basically means that Verizon is stupid and can't figure out if it should let your account login."

Usually I just keep trying and eventually I get allowed to login and connect.

The other cool thing that has happened a few times recnetly is that it changes my connection to "dormant" even though I am clearly not dormant (actively using the internet).

So while it is "dormant" I basically can't transmit any data, and it sometimes will not even let me disconnect and try reconnecting.

I don't have any solutions to these problems, but they are very frustrating.

In 2 years, WiMax should be fully rolled out in Chicago, so I look forward to trying another product, but in the mean time, I am stuck with VZW.

We all know ticketmaster is the leader in screwing people when it comes to buying tickets.  You want 4 $28 tickets?  Ok, that will be $165.  What?

Well, I just got done booking a flight on ATA:

Base Fare Per Passenger: $238.00
Taxes and Fees Per Passenger: $102.50

Yes, the taxes and fees are over $100 per ticket!

Here are some other fees that some airlines apply AFTER you have finished comparing which airline to use (which tickets are cheapest):

• $2.50: U.S. security tax ("the Sept. 11 fee");
• $4.50: U.S. passenger facility charge (Chicago O'Hare);
• $14.50: U.S. international departure tax;
• $24.23: U.K. passenger service charge;
• $37.27: U.K. air passenger duty;
• $14.50: U.S. international arrival tax;
• $5: U.S. customs fee;
• $7: U.S. immigration fee;
• $5: U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection fee;
• $130: United Airlines fuel surcharge.

$130 fuel surcharge???  Gimme a break.

Last nigiht before I went to bed, I was working on a bunch of stuff.

Lots of files, tons of programs, all open to serve the task at hand.

So, at 3am, I was kinda up for some reason, but luck for me, that meant that I got to hear the sound of my laptop rebooting.

I almost got up to go check on it and make sure I wasn't dreaming, but sure enough in the morning I came down to find a login prompt.

Windows Updates on my new laptop. was set to automatically download and install updates at 3am.  Which is a good thing, unless the updates require a restart, which it will do wheather you want it or not.

So I had to turn off automatic updates for this reason, but this brings me to a bigger question.  Couldn't microsoft see this possability and give you and option to download/install but NOT reboot?

They already have a "feature" that is annoying as hell, that bugs you ever 15 minutes when you have installed a windows udpate that requires a reboot, but haven't rebooted yet.  They could just use that to make sure you DO reboot at some time.

Frustrating.

Update: Windows update rebooted my friend Mike's work desktop, even though he had it set to only download and not install updates.  So all those SQL Jobs that were running at the time.... yea they all got screwed up. 

I am about 90% happy with my iPhone, but in order to sync it I have to use iTunes, so I have moved my podcasts and a small subset of my 450GB of mp3s into iTunes to sync it with the iPhone, and I just have to say.... what an awful piece of software.

I mean, it DOES a few things that are nice, like trying to find album art for you, but the usability of this piece of junk is about as bad as any piece of software I have ever used.

I won't go into it, but it really ticks me off when I am trying to do something sooooo simple and it takes me 15 minutes of screwing around and a few trips to google in order to find a way to do it.

So, in conclusion, iTunes sucks.  Oh, and I hate pretty much all the software on my wife's new Mac. 

That is all. 

The other day I got some notification that updates were available for some apple products.  Like an idiot I didn't read it over very carefully.  It looked like it was going to update Quicktime, but I had installed the Safari beta also, so maybe it was going to do something with that as well.

Well it now looks like it also decided to download and install iTunes, a TERRIBLE product that I avoid like the plague so much that I bought some other software to connect my new iPod to I wouldn't have to install that garbage product.

Not only did it appear to intall iTunes, but it also installed an outlook add in 'outlook itunes sync addin' , which crashes outlook when you try to run it.

Here are some more people like me who are pissed off by this.

Here is another of my favorite problems with VS2005.

If I have a Web Application Project.  If I build it (with no errors) then when I try to view it I get the error below.  However,

Parser Error

Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: The type 'Company.Web.Equipment.Global' is ambiguous: it could come from assembly 'C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\equipment\3f386648\c5a85b94\App_Code.gv_z5p7w.DLL' or from assembly 'C:\Data\Company\Company.Web.Equipment\bin\Company.Web.Equipment.DLL'. Please specify the assembly explicitly in the type name.

Source Error:

Line 1:  <%@ Application Inherits="Company.Web.Equipment.Global" Language="VB" %>

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.42

I don't know why it is only happening with this one web app.

Very frustrating.

Update: This has been resolved.  The problem is obvious now.  This was a web application that had been converted to a Web Site Project.  When I tried to reimport the files manually into a new Web Application Project there was one minor, yet major, difference that was causing it to fail.  The "CodeBehind" attribute had been changed to "CodeFile".  I didn't think much of it at the time, but of course this indicates that it is going to actually USE the codefile when the page is accessed.  By having a CodeFile attribute AND compiling the code into a DLL, I was ending up with copies of every class.

OMG TicketMaster Sucks!!!

I just went to buy some tickets for The Secret Machines, and the tickets were 15 bucks each. 

I picked the FREE delivery option, and my order came to $72.30.  WHAT???  3 tickts @ $15 << $72.30.

So for a 15 dollar ticket, they add on a "facility charge" of another buck, then there is the "Convenience Charge" WTF is that BS?  Tax is only 1.50 but then they throw on a "Order Processing Fee" charge of 4.80?? What the hell is the difference between their Order processing fee, and their Convenience charge?  This is totally gay.

In the end my "tickets" cost 60% more than the cost of the "tickets"!!

Ticketmaster really sucks ass.  I hate them with a passion.

And how come I keep signing up to be notified when some bands go on tour and they never email me, those ass hats.

I decided to go with Scott Gu's suggestion to use Web Application Projects to help ease the conversion for 2003.

I will agree that this is a much better way to convert your project than to turn it into a Web Site Project, but there are still lingering problems.

In one of my projects the web page and code behind have somehow become lost.  The code behind pages can't see their controls, which are placed in some mystery file thanks to the new Partial Class feature.

I tried ranaming the files, I tried cutting and then replacing the HTML that defines the controls, the only thing I found that works is to totally delete the file and recreate it exactly the same way.  What a pain.

The "What a pain" concept is the only constant in this process.

I am still not sure what is going on with project references. 

As far as I see, if there is a DLL in the bin directory, you don't need a reference to that DLL.  But as soon as you clean out your bin, your project will break with error messages that are nothing like "Are you missing a reference?" because, of course you are, VS.Net just removes them all the time w/o asking you! 

There must be some new paradigm with how you are supposed to work with references, projects, and solutions, because trying to do it like you would in vs.net 2003 is causing a ton of problems.

Update: Almost as if VS was getting back at me, as soon as I posted this it took a crap and crashed. 

This is really shocking (and very disappointing) to me.

I had the task of upgrading the code base at Walsh Construction from .net 1.1 to 2.0 and putting it all in a source control database.

I had been getting a lot of totally random build problems, and I started wondering: Where does it store my references?

ASP.Net Web Sites projects don't have a vbproj or csproj file anymore, so where is it storing the fact that I want this website to have a references to a given DLL or a given project in my solution?

I found that the answer is that the project references are stored in the solution file! 

If you open up the solution file you will find lots of stuff like this:

ProjectSection(WebsiteProperties) = preProject
ProjectReferences = "{E050AEA3-6DCA-4DE8-936F-5A8B14A912B9}|MyReferencedAssembly.dll;

This is kinda stupid.

Non-website projects keep a list of their references in their project file.

Websites keep SOME reference info in their web.config, although I think that is only for DLLs that are in the GAC.

Anyway on to the list of things that truly suck about how this works:

1)  When you add a reference from a web project to a DLL, the DLL is copied to the Bin directory right then, as opposed to when you do the build.  I bet it does it at build-time as well, but what really sucks is that you can have a situation where WebSiteA references ComponentA which references DataAccessLayerA.  WebSiteA will have DataAccessLayerA.dll in it's bin directory, then if you go to add a references from WebSiteA to DataAccessLayerA, it will say "Oh you already have a reference" when you really don't, and if you try to build it won't work until you go delete that dll from your bin and add the reference.

2)  I have been unable to open some projects without opening the entire solution that I joined them too at one point.  Basically as I was converting all our projects over to 2003 I wanted to also change them from DLL references to project references.  So I created a solution with ever project and website we have in .net.  To illustrate my problem, I added a project to the solution called IAmABogusProject with 1 class and 1 static method.  No one uses this class, no projects have a reference to this project, and this project has no references to any other projects.  Yet, if I go click on the vbproj file for this project, it loads up my solution file with every single project.  I tried creating another solution and adding it to that one to see if it would open the new solution when I tried to reopen the project but no luck, it opened original solution with every application again!! WTF!!

3) This is the worst of the list.  If you have a project in a solution that is referenced by some other projects and you remove that project from the solution, guess what happens?  In 2003 it would remove the project and all the referencing projects would show a missing reference icon.  In 2005 it checks out all the referencing projects and removes the reference!!!  Are you kidding me???  For the cherry on top, you have to then manually add all the references back after you add the project back into the solution, and of course you get all kinds of weird bugs, none telling you that you are missing an assembly reference.  Totally stupid.   This is a bug, see Update3 at the bottom.

I am really pissed about this.  Why do MS product upgrades frequently come with a "What were they thinking?" tag? 

Maybe the roll of the solution has changed or something, but this is going to really piss me off working like this day to day.

I have already had something happen where all my website projects that I had already added to source control lost their binding.  Great....

Update1:  I am continuing to have problems with my web project "losing" references that I have to keep setting.  What a pain this is becoming!

Update2: Scott Gu from Microsoft (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu) suggested that I give the Web Application projects a try.  I had tried them once before when in beta and remembered there was something that was a show stopper at the time.  I don't remember exactly what, maybe the designer didn't work?  Anyway, that could solve a few of my issues, but this whole thing of not being able to open a project without a solution getting opened, and the thing where VS removes references from projects (even if they are under source control) if you remove the project from a solution is crazy.

Update3: Well thank God, someone from Microsoft let me know that this thing with removing a project causing references to disappear is actually a bug: http://www.chrismay.org/2006/04/19/VS2005RemoveProjectLoseReference.aspx