On 5/16/2010 7:25 PM, Mike Ash wrote:
In ,
"noRm d. wrote:

Mike wrote:

In ,
Gene wrote:

On Sat, 15 May 2010 13:56:37 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote:

On 15/05/2010 12:55, William December Starr wrote:
In ,
Martin said:

The guy with the spanner was just a bit unlucky and a victim of
Murphys Law - the spanner really did fall where it could do most
damage.

Could've been worse. Could have been in a Titan II missile silo.

(Okay, that was actually just the socket from a socket wrench, not the
whole tool. It still sufficed though:http://tinyurl.com/2u6ly2,
http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.ne...detail.aspx?en
try
ID=2543'.)

True to form where Murphy's Law is referenced that URL said:

smirk

Error converting data type nvarchar to int.
[snip]
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the
exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.
[snip]
Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.3603;
ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.3082

Don't you just love MickeySoft product reliability!

It appears to be an application programmer error.

It is, in fact, because there's an apostrophe at the end of the URL.
Remove that, and the URL works.

Which shows what incredibly bad software is supporting the thing.

The scary part is that it isn't all that unusual.

There's nothing incredibly bad about this. It's perfectly normal to
error when you try to load a URL that doesn't exist. A really good
system might notice that the URL is very close to one that does exist,
and redirect you, but failing to do so does not make a system bad. This
particular system's failure mode is not pretty, and it really should be
more graceful, but that's just slightly bad, not "incredibly bad".

The point is not the error, but that it was unhandled, even though
calling for a nonsense index is a typical attack.

really, the host script should have vetted for sanity before sending it
on to the data server.