Kudos

Foxslaughter wanted to turn a website into an Android application and was difficulty with a POST request. mccarl offered some explanations and guidance, and Foxslaughter was able to resolve his problems: "mccarl is a genius! Provided amazing help and really helped me understand what my problem was. Now my program works! I wish I had more points to give. I definitely wasn't expecting anyone to be as thorough as mccarl was."

Muskie12 was trying to display a dynamic message on a Sharepoint page, and when teylyn gave an answer, she found out there was more to the problem than meets the eye, so she provided a step-by-step guidebook for Muskie12 to follow: "Wow, much appreciated!"

bbitadmin had a number of scripts he wanted to automate using SQL Server 2008, so jimpen helped him out: "Thanks, this was above and beyond."

le_johney was looking for a macro that would help him go through a table and then do something based on what it found. After clarifying the need, gowflow worked up some code and then posted a sample: "Spot on GowFlow!!!! You really are a Genius....Mastermind! Thanks so much for this. It does just what I wanted it to do! Have a great weekend and thanks for staying up late! All the best!"

pmcd2010's question about merging rows based on a date in Oracle drew the attention of sdstuber: "And now I begin kicking myself for not thinking of this sooner. Thank you so much for your time on this. I was having a major brain block after looking at the same code for a month now."

diverseit's article on "going shopping" when dealing with unstable or slow VPNs (it actually explains "maximum transmission units", but it's his title). It drew praise from LBSOverlord: "This article was really helpful! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!"

Nata's Corner

Just what the world needs: an application that reminds you about your New Year's resolutions. It's easier if you don't make promises you can't keep.

Despite its problems -- a declining workforce (and it's never been very particularly friendly toward women), marketing wannabes finding new suckers and more entries on things like Star Trek than on education -- the people who run Wikipedia have done some great things, like simple.wikipedia.org. Written in simple English ("short, declarative sentences," as the other half's favorite editor would say), it's designed for people who are learning English; to see the differences, look at this article and then this one on the same subject.

If you're one of those people who runs a blog and gets email from all kinds of sites... and comes across one that you think might possibly be legit just because it has all those bugs on it from Trustwave, McAfee, VeriSign and who knows else, don't believe it. Anyone can put a little logo on a site that links back to trustwave.com, mcafee.com or whoever.

I know I have a Gmail account somewhere that I use for one thing and one thing only. Part of the reason I don't use it for anything else is because as we're all aware, anything anyone does on their Gmail account means it's fair game for Google to use, and they do use it. But what's scary is that for all the hype Google sends out about its commitment to privacy, it doesn't seem to have the same commitment to security.

The other half has a pretty good reason -- whenever we're not home, anyway -- for keeping our cell phone plan with Verizon though living in California, we can certainly sign up with almost any carrier, and we're constantly reminded of that fact any time we watch television. It might be smart for us to change if we were big data users (we're not) because speed might be important, but ultimately, we want to be able to use our cell phones as phones, and even Verizon is lacking in that department sometimes. The report about US mobile carriers that says "everybody wins" also means that nobody wins. There's no AT&T tower near us. Verizon has to use towers owned by another company. T-Mobile has no presence at all around here, and everyone else is expensive when we leave California. Sometimes I'd like to smack the guy who invented them.

Microsoft recently sent out an email about removing personal information when you're getting rid of an old computer. It's probably a good idea to take even more serious steps (at least, if you're a little paranoid) because there are government agencies who will snoop around your computer even when you're not connected to the Internet.

Finally, if you haven't seen AT&T's new commercial about remotely controlling your house, but ABC News is apparently taking it seriously, and you should too if you're using the wrong router.

In Brief

Concentric circles: Everyone has, at some point, dropped a pebble into a still pond and watched the waves move away from it. That pretty much describes the events of the last couple of weeks for Target, who first found out that someone had stolen credit card data on about 40 million of its customers using malware installed on its cash registers and followed that up with another revelation that about 70 million people's email accounts and other information had been stolen. To their credit, Target isn't ducking the problem; they're offering free credit monitoring, and finally getting on the bandwagon they and so many others have pooh-poohed for so many years.

But the story is far from over.

They're all alike: The Japanese government has issued a warning about using an input editor provided by the Chinese search engine Baidu because it spies on users. Sound familiar?

Oh, snap: Snapchat -- the app that lets you send a selfie to someone and feel reasonably confident that it's not going to show up on Pinterest or YouTube -- overlooked for months warnings about flaws in its security, and dismissed warnings from the people who identified the flaws that someone would take action, and finally did its best to ignore the whole story when it broke over the holidays. So someone proved to Snapchat the hard way that it was pretty stupid to brush off all the alarms: they released a database of about 4.5 million usernames and phone numbers. These are the same guys who turned down bids of $3 billion from Facebook and $4 billion from Google and who got clobbered by "snap spam" last week.

Sometimes, we put things in this space just because we don't know what to make of them. This is one of them.

In requiem: Richard LeParmentier, choking victim. Hiroo Onada, the Japanese soldier who hid in the Philippines for 29 years after World War II; and AllThingsDigital, the conference and website started in 2007; it has resurrected itself under a new name and company.

Just in time for next New Year's Eve: A printed (and therefore reproducable) liver.

Strangeness on the edge of town: The strangest is why Nvidia picked Chualar in the first place.

Great news for EE: (Sorry, but we couldn't resist... ) GoDaddy will be offering Microsoft Office 365 to its business accounts. Everyone looking to earn points in the web development and MS Office topic areas -- you've been warned. Also, keep an eye out for this question.

And you thought it was just moss: You'll never guess what dogs align themselves with the earth's magnetic axis to do. Okay, maybe you will guess but it's still noteworthy.

Happy birthday, Bitcoin: Great that we'll be able to buy Sacramento Kings tickets with them; now, will the Kings use them to buy some defense? We know they won't be signing the next Yao Ming. Related: Malware in advertising served up on Yahoo turned computers into Bitcoin miners. Happy new year to you, too...

Wishful thinking, right? ... sigh... Unless, of course, you're a lawyer involved in one of their privacy or advertising cases.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Facebook did a survey among its users about whether Facebook is trustworthy. It just won't tell them what they said. The Selfie Olympics.

Milestones

New Prodigies: TheLearnedOne has become the first member of Experts Exchange to reach 5,000,000 points in three different topic areas, most recently in ASP.NET; woolmilkporc reached that level in Unix; he has also gone of the 8,000,000 point level.

New Geniuses: ozo's third career Genius certificate is in Shell Scripting, to go along with one in Math & Science and a Prodigy certificate in Perl. Earning their first were PowerEdgeTech in Server Hardware and mccarl in Java.

My First Million: AlexCode reached the 1,000,000 point level in December, 2013.

Milestones:

• angelIII has earned 2,000,000 points in nine different topic areas. No one else has earned 2,000,000 points in more than five.
• capricorn1 has earned 26,000,000 points since joining Experts Exchange. He also has 26,000,000 points in Microsoft Access, by far the most in any single topic area.
• Ray_Paseur has earned 15,000,000 points in the PHP Scripting topic area.
• hanccocka has earned 15,000,000 points in his EE career.
• jkr has earned 2,000,000 points in each of three topic areas: System Programming, Microsoft Development and C++; he is the leading Expert in all three topic areas.
• CodeCruiser has 5,000,000 points in both VB.NET and .NET.
• LSMConsulting has earned over 12,000,000 points in the Microsoft Access topic area.
• DatabaseMX has reached 11,000,000 points in Microsoft Access.
• sdstuber brings to 45 the number of members with over 9,000,000 points. He also has 8,000,000 points in the Oracle topic area.
• emoreau has earned 2,000,000 points in .NET, VB.NET and Visual Basic.
• chapmandew has earned 4,000,000 points in both MS SQL and SQL Server 2005.
• ScottPletcher has earned 6,000,000 points in the MS SQL topic area; mkline71 accomplished the feat in Active Directory.