So, I opened a business account with a local small bank called Bank of American Fork. So far so good. They haven't annoyed me, but I have been disappointed with their online banking. I realize that the reason for all their free stuff is that they can't compete otherwise.

Case in point... It's been a couple weeks since I opened the account, but I haven't received a debit card yet. So I call my branch and ask them why I haven't received one. The answer is that I need to fill out a form in order to get a debit card. Saaaaay what?!? Ok, this one was my fault, I should have asked them point blank about this.

My credit union, on the other hand, have been a total pleasure to work with. They let me pick a design for my debit card right when I signed up. Not only that, but they also told me that I could upload a picture and use that in the card instead of their stock stuff. I got my debit card with the US flag about 5 business days after I signed up.

Their online banking is superb. Their bill pay is free, and very sophisticated. They have relationships with almost all of the companies I have monthly bills with. On top of that, I can also setup entries for persons. Nice! The other thing that impressed me was that I didn't have to do the 2 small deposit thing with PayPal. It looks like America First Credit Union has integration with PayPal. I only needed to enter my bank account's password and answer the security questions and I got confirmed right away. Nice!

So I have a decision to make. I'm currently running as a sole proprietorship, since I didn't want to bother with a LLC, until SystemWidgets has a nice cash flow. I either continue with Bank of American Fork, or close the account there and use my personal account at America First Credit Union. I also have a joint account with my wife over at the credit union as well, so I can use my personal account to keep my business expenses apart from the family stuff. The no fee business account at BoAF is terribly tempting, but the hassle/annoyance factor is starting to increase.

I know that I ultimately have to make the decision myself, but I would love to hear from the people who read my humble blog.

I was wide awake early this morning, around 4 AM, and couldn't get back to sleep. So I decided to do a little cleaning up and tie lose ends for SystemWidgets. The first thing that I wanted to do was to close my eFax account, since I didn't need it, and it was eating up money that I need for other things.

The first thing I did was to look for a way to close the account myself. Nothing in the FAQ. So I scratch my head. So I kept looking, and found something under Billing: "You need to initiate a chat session, in order to discontinue your account." WTF?!?

Ok, so I initiate the chat. I tell the customer service agent; "Hi, I want to close my account." To which the agent responded with some long spiel about losing me as a client. So I'm thinking, "close my acount!" So now he launches into refunding two months, and wanting me to stay for two months free, then I can see if I want to cancel then.

So, I repeat myself a second time. "Close my a account, I don't want free anything. Just close my account now." So, the agent proceeds to ask me what are my reasons, and gives me a list of 5 choices. I pick two, but I can't remember what they were. The agent launches into another spiel.

By this time, I'm pissed off and very cranky. I'm now thinking "CLOSE-MY-FRAKING-ACCOUNT!!!" I know that this person is reading from a canned script, so he's not to blame for the blatant stuff. I proceed to repeat myself calmly, a herculean task now; "Close my account. I want it closed, discontinued, canceled. Capiche?" So now he finally gets it, and closes the account. GOOD GRIEF, ON A BICYCLE!

I was too angry, so I missed the chance to copy the text of the chat. So officially... eFax you suck! Don't annoy your customers like that.

Now, can anybody recommend a fax service that doesn't suck like that?

I've been using Google Alerts for a while now. I found them mildly useful. However, I have now found that these alerts are very useful when you want to know who's talking about your software. I just got an alert this morning that PainlessSVN showed up on a cracker's website.

I find this extremely amusing. PainlessSVN is not even released and it's already garnering attention. Too funny! Best way to combat this is just to put out a LOT of releases. I'm hoping to put out v1.0 sometime in September.

Here's a screenshot of PainlessSVN Professional Beta 1 running in Windows 2008 Server Beta 3:

I read a great tip for integrating DotNetNuke (DNN) with Google Analytics a few days ago. DNN uses the Default.aspx page on the root folder as a top level container for all content in the portal. It was simplicity itself to just add the Google Analytics script code right before the closing body tag in Default.aspx.

Now all pages in my portal will automatically have the Google Analytics code, even new ones. The only issue is remembering to re-add the script code after upgrading the DNN software.

I have been working with Denis at Eziriz, the creators of .NET Reactor, to solve a problem with a couple 3rd party assemblies that were not merging. I found by accident, that it was the *.nrproj file that I was using for PainlessSVN Professional was corrupted. I ended up recreating a new file and used the *.mkey from the previous project. I found this out, when I was doing the protection for the new version of SVN  Backup Widget. These external assemblies merged just fine using the *.nrproj for SVN Backup Widget, so I realized that it was probably not .NET Reactor.

Things are now peachy. Denis Mierzwiak, the Chief Technical Officer, has been very patient with me. Gotta love small software companies with good tech support!

Well, I finally got Beta 1 out the door. This took a lot of work, mostly testing.  I needed to setup a virtual machine with Windows XP and the Visual Studio 2005 ecosystem. Just gotta love VMWare Workstation! I really believe that virtual machines cut down on the costs of QA for microISVs.

My background is network/system admin. I was the guy setting up new servers, users, app permissions, and all those little details that make a network and desktops work smoothly. I still remember when Ghost came out. That sure was a step forward in desktop support. Then VMWare came out, and caused another leap forward in usability.

I'm hoping that PainlessSVN will cause a leap forward in adoption of Subversion.

PainlessSVN uses an open sourced library to "objectize" Subversion's command-line utilities. I have it listed on both SourceForge and CodePlex. I just started using SvnBridge to talk to CodePlex. CodePlex is oriented towards .NET projects, so I thought it natural to host the bulk of releases and work items over there.

The changes in SVNManagerLib bubble up to PainlessSVN. I'm hoping to also power the upcoming XML-RPC server, that will allow me to make PainlessSVN work across WANs. I'm leaning towards XML-RPC, because it is a well known protocol and works very well in non-Windows environments. My goal is to have this running under Mono at some point. This will allow admins to run Subversion on Linux (and any other OS that supports Mono) and the front end on Windows. I have a friend that is creating a front end for the Mac.

Here's the URL for the CodePlex project:

http://www.codeplex.com/svnmanagerlib

I have now completed all the code fixes and features for Beta 1. I'm tracking down a runtime error in Windows XP. I'm in the process of setting up a new VMWare virtual machine to test this. It looks like I need to install VS2005 on WinXP to track this down.

I also ended up wasting time by downloading the latest version of .NET Reactor, 3.3.0.1, and having to track down why my installation broke down. It turned out that I had included a couple new  3rd party controls, and .NET Reactor is having problems with it. I ended up reverting to the previous version (because I didn't know better), and excluding these 2 assemblies from the merge list.

Lessons Learned:

• Don't &#$%@& install a new version of your tools, if you are about to push out a release.
• Don't succumb to the "Pretty, pretty, shinny, shinny" urge to try everything new.
• Don't put hard dates on releases. The release will be ready, when it's ready

The one new feature I'm excited about, is the ability to manage repositories even if they are on different paths. This was a big issue with the testers.

Anyways, I'll keep you guys appraised and updated.

Now if I could just book me an appeareance on the Simpson's show...