Decrypting MS SQL 2000 Stored Procedures

I ran across the need to decrypt some stored procedures. I’m writing an interface to a large enterprise application that the company I work for makes. I just want to see the stored procedure code so I could understand what it was doing. Everytime I asked for access to the source code it was like I was asking for emails from the white house. Finally I figured I would just have to go it alone.

So after about 5 minutes of surfing and passing by shareware products, I came across this url, Decrypt encrypted stored procedures.

I took the stored procedure and turned it into a script that would automatically decrypt the stored procedures in a database. One thing this can’t handle is decrypting stored procedures that are > 4000 characters, since they take up more the 1 row in syscomments. So for me I was able to decrypt about half of the 1300 stored procedures this application uses. Also about half the decrypted stored procedures were recreated under the id I was running the script with rather then dbo.

The logic is pretty simple to follow so I think I might spend some time and build a .net app to decrypt the stored procedures that are > 4000 characters. Don’t hold your breath though, with the stored procedures I decrypted and profiler I was figure out what I needed to figure out.

Download: decrypt.vbs

Fading

I’ve found that there are just a ton of articles that I can’t really read. I took a look at the older unread articles and most are either not that interesting to me or about something I already read. I figure those articles can just go away and I’ll never know or care, so I built in articles fading.

I’ve added an integer field to my feeds table so I can individually define the time to live for the articles in each feed or 0 for forever. I also added a field to each article to flag if it was faded or not for reporting.

Now a script runs nightly to fade articles and keep my unread list trimmed down. This keeps me from having to check feeds with a large number of unread articles and manually clearing them out.

Bundling

I’m about half way through setting up a new feature called bundles on my rss reader. I’ve found that following rss via tags is a pretty good way to go but sometimes I’m doing research on an overarching topic and I need a something to bring it all together.

As it stands now a bundle is a group of tags and feeds that have some common focus. I’ve got one for mobile that includes feeds from wapreview, MobileCrunch, SMS Text News and a few others, plus the tags: mobile, phone, verizon, sprint, tmobile, sms, smartphone and a few others. This way I can follow the mobile industry not just via mobile focused blogs, but also articles that are tagged with a mobile focus.

As long as the bundles stay under 50 articles a river style reading will do fine. If the bundles consistantly have more the 50 articles then I may have to include a secondary grouping structure probably in the form of a tag cloud.

Reader Options

Until I get the time to create a new video, I’ll just update pieces.
This is the side navigation for my media.home application as it pertains to my news reader.

Tag Cloud - This opens a tag cloud that shows the current tags associated with unread articles. After I’m finished reading the articles directly associated with a chosen tag, I’m prompted to search the rest of the unread articles for that tag in their title. This is useful for tags like Microsoft or Google but not so much for tags like product profiles used by techcrunch or daily trivia.

Feed List - This shows a list of all the feeds that have a weight greater then 1 or have 5+ articles. With 100 feeds showing them all is to long a list so it’s geared towards the ones I want to hear from the most. I also have special feeds for articles that have diggs and for articles flagged as Techmeme.

Latest - This ones pretty simple and shows articles with the latest at the top.

Oldest - Same as latest but with the oldest at the top.

Review - List of the articles flagged for review.

Recent - Most recent articles read in reverse chronological order. Helps when I accidently mark something read.

Search - Can search the title of the article with the option of including the articles body also.

Admin - Used to manage feeds and some basic reporting.

Article Look and Feel

Here’s what each article looks like in my reader. Here a list of the sections as shown on the left of the image.

Title & Link - Article title and the link clicks through a tracking page that logs the followed links.

Actions - More info on this below.

Action Display - This area is normally hidden unless an action is clicked that needs additional input.

Text - Body of the post.

Metadata - Additional data in this order now: Weight, Diggs and Techmeme flag.

Favicon - This is the favicon pulled from the blog.

Favorite - Marks it for long time storage. Used for posts like how-to’s or as a reference.

Mark Read - Marks the article read and longs time for usage reporting.

Review - Flags the article for later. Used when I don’t have time to fully read so I can get back to it. Main difference between this and favorite is that these are just flagged until I get a chance to really read the article.

Email - Right now hooked up to gmail so I can send an article to a friend.

del.icio.us - This brings up the del.icio.us interface with link and title prepopulated.

Blog it - This displays a small textbox for me to enter in 120 characters of text which posts to twitter, tumlbr and jaiku. It’s 120 characters because I reserve 20 for the tinyurl automatically inserted into post. Examples: http://twitter.com/smilbandit

Info - I haven’t figured out what I want to do with this yet. I know I want to be able to link to a source of additional data for this post but I’m not sure what that is yet.

Tags - Pulls up the tags associated with this article.

Added Techmeme

Long time since my last update. Since then I’ve added Techmeme into my information sources. I was temped to include the firehose feed but thought better of it. Instead I use the information from Techmeme and flag any article that is on Techmeme. This flag is used to pump up the weight of an article and enhance the weight of the tags associated to that article.

This makes it so that I’m not contributing to my RSS fatigue but helps notify of that something that normally will read has some importance.

This post mimics my thoughts on why I wanted to include Techmeme but not something like the firehose feed.
Why I Read Techmeme via A VC

Added Digg stats to unread articles

I’ve added digg stats to the unread articles.  The thought is to crowd source the articles that are weighted low on my personal schema but dug alot.  Eventually I don’t want to feel that I need to read every article.  By using digg stats I’ll know that the more talked about posts will be brought to my attention and should help with discovering content that is outside what I might normally read.

Right now I have the query engine for digg stats down to about one hour or so for 200 articles, most come back with no diggs.  It will run every three hours right now but probably with my reading habits it will only need to run twice aday since it’s function is ancillary to the main function.

I’ll probably add additional sources like reddit, del.icio.us or maybe techmeme if I figure how to plug into it.

Posted a video

Finally got a chance to do a screen capture of the RSS Reader i’m working on.  Enjoy…

Exiting the Twilight Zone

This is the end of the voyage into the past.  Thanks for joining me on the journey.

Here’s a list of the previous posts in order:

RSS Fatigue

Relieving RSS Fatigue

Post Actions

Weighting RSS

Feed list modification

Added Search

Fav.or.it

Fav.or.it

First time I read about fav.or.it.  Felt good that I was going down a similar track as someone else but also a little bad because my idea wasn’t the first to hit the thoughts of everyone.  I saw a few screenshots and noticed that they weren’t open for registrations yet so I decided that I’d try to not look at it anymore and develop my path.

From what I saw it looked pretty good, much better design then mine.  For me a design is something I have to come to through use.  I don’t seem to have that ability to take a blank screen and know how things should be laid out. 

Having comments as part of the reader design is definitely different and probably not something I’m real interested in doing.  I don’t comment on many posts although I did when .mobi was getting setup, just didn’t think it was a good idea plus I liked m. better.  I also wonder how blogs themselves will like this if it becomes popular since their only source of ad space will be in the feed.  I hope it doesn’t mean that my feeds will be stuffed with pop-up like ads.