The Ministry of Justice

Is it just me or does “The Ministry of Justice” sound completely Orwellian.

Scott Hanselman’s 2007 Ultimate Developer Tools List for Windows

The subject says it all, but this really is a cool list of tools;

Scott Hanselman’s 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

Religeous Schadenfreude

I’m no fan of religeon, of any description, if strong and explicit anti-religeous sentiments upset you don’t read this post.

Yesterday in the UK a senior elder of the cult of Jehovahs Witnesses, in somerset I think, was effectively let off for committing crimes of paedophilia.

Apparently he cooperated with the police, and admitted his guilt, 2 factors which according to the judge contributed to his lenient non sentance of community rehabilitation.

So it’s not only the Catholics who protect their own it seems, the Jehovahs Witness organisation have so far not made any comment, although it is known that they will not be kicking him out (disfellowshipping him) or turning their backs on him, oh no, they will indeed be supporting him and he will retain a senior position within the cult. 

This is disgusting enough, it’s even more unbeliveable, to think that they would support him, knowing that this person (apparently) baby-sat  and went on holiday with some of the cults own children. This is a person who has never apologised or made repentent noises towards any of the children he abused. This is a person who abused his senior position within the cult to prey on children, this is a person who sexually abused an 18 month old baby.  This person lied in court, blaming his childhood for his present abuse, this is a person without morals or conscience.

His own sister, thinks the “sentance” is dispicable and reprehensible, and that he should well have served time in prison.

So yeah this vitriole is schadenfreude on my part for I have nothing but contempt for religeon, especially ones such as this, who blatently and unashamedly display their hypocracy for the world to see.

Michael Porter I spit on you, if you were on fire in the street, I’d happily pour the petrol on you shit eating scum sucking bottom feeder.

In the final reckoning, I hope I’m wrong and that God does exist, so he can visit upon you his own divine justice.

Arrrrrrggh ASP Server.CreateObject Failures

Actually my tantrum, as it turned out, has nothing to do with ASP (sadly).

So I’m working on a classic ASP application, implementing some new security features concerning local machine user accounts and domain user accounts. I notice that occasionally I’m getting ASP 0177  errors which stem from the Server.CreateObject() function failing, sometimes with an unhelpful “Object not found” error, sometimes with an “Invalid Prog Id” error and then sometimes with a “Remote procedure call failed” error.

After much head scratching, ensuring that the objects to which the Prog Ids relate, do exist and are registered, lots of googling,  I start to notice a pattern. If I log into the Web app (isolated) first using a domain user account, log out and subsequently log back in using a local machine user account, everythings fine. But if I log in first using a local machine user account, things start vomiting badly.

This starts to point me in the right direction as it seems to indicate that there’s a permissions problem (which is true), so I check that the accounts have the right permissions to launch and access the related COM+ application and objects. Which they do, so this doesn’t help as I’m still getting the problem.

Ok time to start thinking laterally, given that there’s a number of different errors, I decide to tackle them one by one, so by chance I decide to pick the “Invalid Prog Id” error first. Given a Prog Id, an object can be created by looking up the Prog Id in the registry, grabbing the CLSID and from that key it would lead to the DLL module concerned which CoCreateInstance can then use to instantiate an object. I locate the Prog id in the registry, and check it’s permissions.

Aah, the permissions expressed, wouldn’t give the local machine user account access to the registry key so that would explain the “Invalid Prog Id” error. So I check the Prog Id permissions for the other COM objects involved, and they turn out to be the same.

Mmmmm, I expand the search and go back to the root HKCR node and check permissions there, interestingly I find that only my domain user account and the SYSTEM account have read permissions from that node downwards, which isn’t right, the Administrators group at least should have Full Control permissions from that node, but oddly it doesn’t!

So I set about fixing it, I add the Administrators group with Full Control permissions, I also add the Users group with Read permissions and another specific application related group also with Read permissions.

Fire up the Web app, log in using a local machine user account, and (obviously enough) it all works

Question is though, what cobbled the registries HKCR permissions in the first place?

Oracle EZConnect

EZConnect is a new’ish connector string type which you can use, say, in OLEDB connections strings or connecting to a Database with SQLPlus.

The format goes like this;

<username>/<password>@<connect identifier>

where <connect identifier> has the following form;

[//<host>:<port>/]<servicename>

E.g.

phil/mypass@//devhp1xp:1521/2k_corp01