Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
brrreeeport
 
.Naked Monoculture Bites MSDN
 
What Computers Know
 
Launching Naked Conversations
 
Confirmable Experience: Outstanding Microsoft Customer Service
 
Ariane 501: A "History's Worst Software Bug" Provides the Wrong Lesson
 
Phish Eggs: "We Can't Do Anything About That ..."
 
ODMA: The Little Middleware That Could
 
What Programmers Do
 
The Comfort of Open Development Processes

Stupid Is as Stupid Does: Me and NewsGator

I updated NewsGator to overcome a problem I had with a site that silently and unilaterally upgraded all of its Atom feeds to Atom 1.0.  This cured one problem only to saddle me with another, as described in the final update to that saga.   A comment on that article provided a link to a NewsGator knowledge-base article and patch that is purported to remedy the new problem.

{tags: TROSTing NewsGator confirmable experience system coherence least privilege UAC SUA orcmid}

2006-02-14-08:58 I thought I’d fixed it.  When I noticed that my NewsGator Outlook folders were being trashed, I manually went into my subscriptions and either deleted a subscription or changed it to be stored into a specific Outlook folder of my choosing.  I did that for all 190 feeds.  When I was done, I had 100 subscriptions left.   I figured I had resolved the problem, after 90 minutes of painful editing.  I was still grumpy, but I figured I had some respite while I figured out a better way to do this.  I can also resubscribe to the deleted feeds on an opportunistic basis when I want to be caught up on one of them.  Meanwhile, all of my existing feed “clippings” are still sitting in my Outlook folders and kept searchable by Windows Desktop Search.  I can get back to work.

2006-02-14-14:30 Not So Fast, Sparky.  When I saw the comment, I took a look at the NewsGator Knowledge Base item.  It’s a little daunting that it is not at a NewsGator domain, but the download is from a NewsGator URL.  Since I had already gone through and corrected everything, I was hoping that my problem was resolved and I could proceed without applying a patch.

Haven’t We Met Somewhere Before?  The odd thing about the patch is that is offered for some other problems.  When I was researching the status of NewsGator Outlook 2.5 before updating to 2.5.12.495, I saw a patch file of the same name being offered for another class of problem(s). That other problem involves some weird confluence of interactions depending on installation of Visual Studio 2005 (which I don’t have on this machine) and a variety of plug-ins that might be installed in Outlook (none of which I have) and that conspired to prevent NewsGator from running.  The peculiarity of these interactions and the “try this, maybe it will help” approach is not something that I find confidence-inspiring and I figured I would not be using any patch unless I absolutely had to (and was still using NewsGator).

I’m Still Screwed, Time to Patch.  A while later, I manually start a NewGator “Get News” and son-of-a-gun, there are renamed folders again.  I look in the NewsGator | Subscriptions … list and I see that all of my subscriptions have been either marked as destined for <base> or for folders having the same name as the feed.   All of those carefully-entered manual corrections have been trashed.

2006-02-14-18:36 Patching Is Such Sweet Sorrow.  I downloaded the patch (it is gigantic, larger than the production release).  I upgrade what I call my least-privilege Safe User Account (SUA, just to add to the confusion around LUA and UAC) to Administrator so I can do an install that has NewsGator operating only under the one SUA account.  I launch the patch program and it completes successfully, completing much more quickly than I was expecting based on the size of the download.

NewsGator, Where Are You?  I restore my account to non-administrator SUA (limited access, in Windows XP parlance), restart my computer, and then bring up Outlook.  NewsGator isn’t there at all.  The updated to 2.5.12.495 didn’t have this problem.  I wonder what’s different.   This is starting to become my worst nightmare.

NewsGator Diagnostics Tell All.   There’s a program called NewsGator Diagnostics on the Start | All Programs | NewsGator menu.  I run it.  Oh, I see, the patched NewsGator needs to modify something in Outlook and my SUA account doesn’t write privileges to do that.  I’ve been here before.  There are essentially first-time startup operations of the NewsGator Outlook plug-in that require unusual privileges.  I change the account type back to Administrator.  I run NewsGator Diagnostics again and it seems to succeed.  I go back to least privilege, start up Outlook, and NewsGator is there and running.

2006-02-14-20:30 Endless Optimism.  I had the vague hope that somehow my fixed-up subscriptions would be restored, but that isn’t to be.  So I spend an hour after dinner fixing them all up once again.  Meanwhile, to get through this without messing up I delete 40 more subscriptions, ending up with 60 of the 190 I started with in the morning.  Some of these I know I’ll want back, and I’ll resubscribe to those later.

2006-02-14-22:00 Unlimited Pessimism.  I have to tell you that I was fully expecting the patch not to work.  And the only way to know is to have done all of the cleanups and then downloaded any updates to the 60 subscribed feeds remaining in my list.  I click to “Get News” and NewsGator works through the downloads.  There isn’t much new, but it all goes to the right places.  My subscription entries seem to be unchanged.  I’ve exhausted myself fretting with this stuff and I shut down to see what the new day will bring.

2006-02-15-12:16 Reflections: What a Difference a Day Makes.  I have downloaded feeds again and there is no further disruption.  The patch brings me to version 2.5.12.537 of NewsGator and apart from installation hiccups I’ve seen before (requiring unusual privileges to complete setup during the first-use of the application), I seem to be back in business.  I have even subscribed to two feeds as a result of some morning e-mail alerts that I receive.

I’m relieved that I still have my system and all of my feed clippings intact.  I’m mildly dismayed at the difficulty that I went through and that there are data-corruption cases and plug-in interference conditions to be found in a feed reader.  The fact that NewsGator is a .NET application is also revealing in ways that I don’t even want to think about.

I think there are lessons here concerning the difficulty of having predictable, coherent behavior of software.  I also think that there is something to be seen about how one confirms operation, confirms difficulties, and is able to provide positive support responses.  I also notice that going to NewsGator to see if there were already-known problems about corruption of subscriptions was not part of my approach to finding a solution.  I figured it was a failure of the update process and not a chronic condition of the new version.  I went directly to working around the damage.  I didn’t realize I was making a bet, but I lost it anyhow.

posted by orcmid at 2/15/2006 12:37:01 PM