Author Archives: Stephen Pickett

About Stephen Pickett

Web developer

SharePoint DCOM Error on Windows Server 2008 R2

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I’ve been experiencing a confusing error message on one of our servers recently which seems to be occurring every minute or so. It took me a while to track down the solution so I just wanted to share it in the hope that it may help others. The error itself is:

“The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}
and APPID
{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}
to the user xxxx SID (S-1-5-21-2253663647-1569451007-2477840854-1675) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.”

where xxxx is the username which I have blanked out for obvious reasons. I found a solution to this however the options were blanked out – a comment revealed a link to aid this solution, the entirety of which I shall detail below:

  1. Open Registry Editor (Start -> Run -> regedit -> OK)
  2. Open the search box (Ctrl F)
  3. Copy and paste the key reporting the error, in our case: 61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1
  4. Right click the key and select Permissions
  5. Click Advanced
  6. Select the Owner tab
  7. Change ownership to the Administrators group (ensuring that you are logged in as an administrator that is part of this group)
  8. Select the Permissions tab
  9. Give the Administrators group full control
  10. Click OK
  11. Click OK
  12. Open Component Services (Start -> Administrative Tools -> Component Services)
  13. Expand Component Services
  14. Expand Computers
  15. Expand My Computer
  16. Expand DCOM Config
  17. Scroll down to IIS WAMREG admin service and right click on it
  18. Select Properties
  19. Select the Security tab
  20. Check the Customize radio button *under “Launch and Activation”) and then select Edit
  21. Add in your service account (preferably an account dedicated to SQL Server for SharePoint) and give it the appropriate permissions (probably Local Launch and Local Activation, but possibly also Remote Launch and Remote Activation if these alone do not work)
  22. Restart IIS

I found these solutions at http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Fix-the-SharePoint-DCOM-10016-error-on-Windows-Server-2008-R2.aspx and http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/tfsadmin/thread/883b5f1c-1718-4b9a-a6c8-bf32c5d4d6d2/ so thanks to those for providing them. Hopefully my post can get the message out further.

ThinkTwit Update 1.2.0

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I’ve just released a new minor release of ThinkTwit – version 1.2.0. This release demanded a minor release (e.g. 1.x.0, rather than maintenance, e.g. 1.1.x) due to a significant re-write of the code – specifically around the visibility of functions.

The ThinkTwit class now contains all of the core functionality that operates on processing data within ThinkTwit (the tweets), especially caching and output. The only code outside of this is the Tweet class, code to register the widget, and handling of shortcodes and public function calls.

Many new features have also been introduced and there has been a major update of the readme and screenshots to reflect the changes made:

  • Massive update to the readme, including updated screenshots
  • Re-write of code to make better use of object orientation and private/public functions
  • More flexibility in shortcodes and output anywhere function (thinktwit_output) – including ability to use caching
  • Introduced ability to alter time output text e.g. “This happened 16 minutes ago”
  • Added class to style error message when using AJAX
  • General readability improvements to code

Hope everyone finds this useful – if you have any comments please make them below, including any requests for new features (feature list available on the ThinkTwit page).

NOTE: After updating you may need to go in to your widget settings and press Save if you find that your times (e.g. “This happened…”) do not show.

Graphics card issues

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So two weeks ago I was playing Duke Nukem Forever when my PC crashed – ever since I’ve been unable to boot past the Windows loading screen.

After various testing, and eventually getting fed up and passing it over to my mate, I’ve found that the graphics card seems to have fried itself. Although it can load in safe mode it seems that running on “all cylinders” just isn’t possible.

Looking around on the net there seems to be a pattern of some nVidia graphics cards burning out when running the 275.33 build (the latest) drivers. The next step is to RMA it to get a replacement.

Unfortunately this is holding up the next release of ThinkTwit which is nearly done. It’s quite a big code change and so warrants a new minor release. Hopefully in by the end of August it will be complete, just before I head off to Tunisia for a holiday with my girlfriend :)

Better WordPress reCAPTCHA

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I’ve added the Better WordPress reCAPTCHA plugin to the blog in order to reduce the amount of spam accounts that are created by bots. Even though Akismet seems to do a good job of filtering the spam, I’ve still gotta delete it and also the users associated with them – it seems to be a good plugin!

I knew I wanted to add a CAPTCHA plugin but I wasn’t sure which to add – this one had a few very high votes so I thought I’d check it out and as it integrates with Akismet I thought I’d give it a go. It’s actually quite clever as it checks Akismet to see if it is spam before prompting for a CAPTCHA, which means it should actually inconvenience people a lot less than others. It also allows you to automatically display comments if the user has previously had comments approved and it’s quite flexible around styling.

If you have any issues with it, or even if you just like it, please let me know.

ThinkTwit Update 1.1.7

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I’ve just posted a new update to ThinkTwit – I found numerous small bugs including:

  • Cache not saving with the widgetid so all widget instantiations were sharing the same cache
  • Previous cache size determined all future cache size i.e. it could not resize if limit was changed or there were few tweets last time but more this time
  • Tweets from other users were output if they were previously allowed but now no longer
  • Other minor issues

These have now all been fixed and I can’t find any other issues with caching. This means I can get on with the roadmap of people’s requests. Please feel free to let me know of any issues you find!

ThinkTwit Update 1.1.6

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So I recently noticed that although my last update included caching, there were some times in which the cache would not be accessed correctly – specifically, when updating from Twitter it was overwriting the cache rather than updating it and then displaying the cache. This wouldn’t be a problem if the live update was full of tweets, but if it had only one it would overwrite the cache with only 1 tweet.

Additionally, have split the Live option in to “Live (uncached)” and “Live (cached)”. The former will not use the cache at all and will always go straight to Twitter (meaning if Twitter is down it will not display anything) and the latter will always check for updates from Twitter (rather than waiting x since last update to check it) and then store the updates in the cache before displaying cached tweets.

I’ve updated the ThinkTwit page on my blog with the roadmap as during this update I’ve realised a few other minor bugs. I’ll get on to these in the coming weeks.

ThinkTwit Update 1.1.5

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So it’s been slightly over a year and due to various problems with my PC (an incredibly difficult issue to resolve as I had issues with more than one part) and lack of time I’ve been unable to complete the work that I started after the last update.

Anyway, I’ve finally found time and am happy to announce version 1.1.5 – it includes caching of tweets to the local WordPress database and the implementation of shortcodes. Please check the readme for more details.

I have also updated the roadmap – I will do my best to keep ThinkTwit up-to-date in the future.