Skip to main content

Querying GitHub Issues from Google App Script

I'm currently exploring different integrations that can be done between Google App Script and Git. This is part of a bigger attempt to integrate Git data into my project management system. I'll post more on that later. GitHub supports a number of very nice sub-systems. One of them is the GitHub Issues ticket tracking system. It's fairly robust and comes with GitHub - which means it's highly integrated out-of-the-box. Integration with Google's App Script is done via the fetchURL command and JSON object manipulation.  After a good bit of experimentation, I've settled on querying GitHub Issues with an "on open spreadsheet event" to avoid issues with Google's quota system. Essentially, Google prevents you from calling the fetchURL command more than X times (see the quota limits ) per day. That's not great if you have people actively working and changing data in a spreadsheet. Some of my other App Script routines are running thousands of times per d

Another Vista oddity

I've assumed, incorrectly apparently, that the Vista "Run as Administrator" function is akin to the sudo or su function in *nix systems. For those not familiar with sudo, it basically provides a one-time elevation of privileges to execute a special command or a command requiring additional user rights. Su basically creates a new security context using the super user and switches into that context (i.e., in a shell, typing su and then the super user password gives you the "super user shell").

Vista does not appear to hold this idea, or at the very least, not entirely. The thing that started me down this path is my use of the subst command. For those who haven't read some of my other articles, I use subst to create a virtual environment letting me work on multiple projects without having to pull the source code down from svn (i.e., c:\source\code1, c:\source\code2, etc. get swaped out to be j:\ for which ever path I'm working with at the time). At any rate, I had my normal command prompt open, substed in the paths I wanted and fired up Delphi 2007. Everything worked great except D2007 locked up everytime I hit a particular bug. Thinking it might be a privledge error causing Delphi to hang, I started Delphi using "Run As Administrator".

Suddenly, nothing would compile. I kept getting error messages saying that the files were missing or locked. Thinking I'd somehow gotten a lock on my files, I rebooted, repeated the process and got the same results. I checked the subst in the command prompt and everything was fine. As a double-check, I then opened a command prompt using "Run As Administrator", typed in subst and voila, no substed drives. Subst in the drives and suddenly everything works as expected.

Apparently, the "Run As Administrator" function has a lot more in common with Terminal Services than it does an elevated privledge in the same session. If you're having problems, you may want to make sure the settings apply equally to the logged in user AND to the "Run As" user.

EDIT:

In another discovery, the network doesn't remember connections either. I have no idea why I thought it would, but it definitely doesn't. If you perform a net use z: \\somedrive\someshare in a normal session, it won't show up in your Run As sessions (and vice versa).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

SMTP Mail and Indy (again)

Having spent a lot of time recently working on a ping scanner using Indy, I noticed that there's a lot of questions still on using SMTP with Indy. Let me first say that I am not an Indy expert. I get along with it successfully but find I still have to research things frequently. With the disclaimer out of the way, we can get to the offering. A while back I wrote a handy little unit to simply send a mail message with or without attachments and with or without providing authentication. It even has support for OpenSSL. I use this unit in a number of applications and have seen it successfully send hundreds of e-mails without issue. I recently added support for threaded message sending to take advantage of the multi-core system I'm now running on. This code has had a few additions (like the logger) that I've gleaned over time from various newsgroup postings, but I didn't record the authors so let me credit the anonymous Internet authors who support Indy. It's really amaz

Detecting a virtualized environment

CubicDesign on delphi-talk.elists.org recently asked the question: "How do I know/detect if my software is running under Windows [or a virtual environment]?" Well, it turns out that it's a lot harder to tell than you would think. Apparently, the VM (VMware, Xen, Wine, etc.) doesn't really want you to be able to do this. At least not easily. For VMware, there is a decent little C routine called jerry.c that does the trick. Jerry actually uses a simple communication channel that VMware left open. It's not 100% foolproof since the admin can change the channel, but that's not likely going to happen unless the system is specifically designed to be a honeypot. If you're running on a honeypot and still have a legitimate reason for detection, you could look at the much more complex scoopy implementation which inspects how the system is actually virtualized using the SIDT CPU instruction instead of a communication channel. Another reference (red pill) is here . F

Vista UAC Manifest

Here's a couple of interesting little tidbits for those using Delphi 2007 and trying to create manifest files to require your program to run as Administrator. For those who don't know what this means, we're talking about running a program and receiving the wonderful little pop-up "A program is trying to take over your life"... well, something like that anyway. You will need your program to receive elevated privileges if you want to do certain things. In my particular instance, I wanted to write to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry entries. This isn't supposed to be a full reference to what a manifest is, how it works, etc., etc. Microsoft has documented the UAC in some depth and I recommend using their documentation if you want to really understand your options. First, the manifest structure is basically just an XML document that tells Vista how it should handle the program. For elevated privileges, it should look like: < assembly xmlns ="urn:schemas-mic

Copyright 2008-2022, Marshall Fryman