The short version: Setting my clock to the current date fixes invalid security certificate errors in IE7 and log-in problems with MSN Messenger. The rest of this post is embellishment so that it can be picked up by a movie producer and turned into a film starring Neil Patrick Harris as the Coding Hillbilly and Scarlett Johansson as Mrs. Coding Hillbilly.

A frantic call from Mrs. Hillbilly led to my edification of yourselves today: "Coding Hillbilly! He'p me, he'p me! I'sa gotta chekin' this har e-mail for'un my boss and I kint git into the Hotmail! Ya gotsta he'p me, Coding Hillbilly!"

"Be right thar, Cabbage!" and I moseyed on over to her place as quick as the T-bird could fly.

The error message: There is a problem with this website's security certificate.

Now I've seen this often enough with the dawn of IE7 but this happened when she navigated to Hotmail of all places. Of course, she could continue on to the website with the nice calming red address bar at the top but it didn't inspire a lot of confidence that her computer was running at peak performance.

At this point, the missus also pointed out that MSN Messenger was also puking all over her machine when she tried to log-in. Error 80048820 which is, as you could probably guess, security-related. The surprisingly effective help system in Messenger led me to a much prettier version of this page.

Being a technically-minded hillbilly, I skimmed through the page looking for the most obtuse solution on the page and I went on my merry way re-registering DLLs and adjusting SSL options, none of which worked. Then option 3 stuck out at me: Verify the date and time settings on your computer.

Huh? says I. Mrs. Hillbilly, who is hovering in a non-intrusive manner, notices my confusion: "Oh yeah, I had to change the clock for something else."

A quick update to bring the date back a few months to February 19, 2007 and all is well again with our corner of the world.

I wish no explanation as to why changing the clock affects MSN Messenger or security certificates. (I can make a partially-educated guess as to the latter.) Security is not my strong suit as anyone who has come to my house and found the doors wide open can attest to. I don't particularly care why they're related. All that matters is that someone else in the world does and he or she finds it fit to document his or her knowledge on the Internets.

And on a concluding note, I hate security and all software and hardware related to it, including but not limited to: anti-virus, spam, phishing, SSL, permissions, LDAP, NTLM, forms authentication, SecurID tokens, VPNs, swipe cards, PIN numbers, security deposits, car alarms, bike locks, and cell phones for seven-year-olds.I don't like that the major upgrade to Windows XP was a firewall that broke a bunch of apps. And that among IE7's features is not to let me into websites because I'm not smart enough to figure out if they're dangerous. And that Vista's main differentiation from XP is that it's harder to play my music. I will concede, however, that retinal scanners are pretty cool.

Not that I don't understand the need for it, which I very much do. I just hate the fact that we have to deal with it. But then, I'm far too much of an optimist to really understand the Prisoner's Dilemma that has led to everything from DRM to the "guilty until proven innocent" mentality that permeates our airport authority system.

Finally! I'm part of the elite! Part of the clique who can now recommend Lutz Roeder's Reflector with full knowledge of its greatness.

Until today, I was just a poser. I knew of Reflector and was keenly aware of what it did. I played with it for a bit but had never in my consulting career come across an instance where I needed to dive that deeply into someone else's code. But I left it installed on my machine because I wanted to pretend to be one of the big boys. And I started to crave the appreciative nods I'd get from better developers when they'd see it prominently displayed on my desktop.

Then lo! An e-mail comes screaming through my Inbox: where is this error message generated for the Franken-app you built that syncs PalmPilot data with Livelink?

(Side note: If I can brag a little, I'm actually kind of proud of that app. Built in .NET, it works better than the application I was trying to mimic on the old software Livelink was replacing.)

The app uses Livelink's API to wedge stuff into the system so after a quick look through Livelink's code base itself to see if the error was there, I dusted off Reflector and pointed it at the API assembly. String search and lo, again! There it is!

So now I can accurately answer that e-mail: It is generated in the receiveOpenResponse method of the LLConnectRouter object in LAPI_NETp.dll.

That should get them off my back, yesno?

The picture up top is the banjo player from Deliverance. The duet he does with another character in the movie is kind of an informal family theme song.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 has been released but you knew that. ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit has been released but you knew that, too.

What you may not have known is that the RoundedCornersExtender in the new release now features the ability to specify which corners you wish to round. The code looks absolutely nothing like my version and from my brief comparison of their code to mine, that's a good thing.

A nice little bonus: not only can you rounded specific corners (e.g. TopLeft, BottomRight) but there are shortcuts to round pairs of corners (e.g. Top will round both the top left and top right corners).

So I'll take my version of the RoundedCorners down soon but in the meantime, if you've hit this page from a search engine, skip it and download the real thing.