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February 4, 2009 - Happy Chinese New Year! >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Moderators, Geniuses and Kudos

Corporate Accounts Continues to Grow
Meet our 1,047th Corporate Client

More For The Obama In-Box
A few more items for the 44th President

Corporate Spammers
kieran_b on big companies that spam

More News and Notes
A revised version of revisionism

Nata's Corner
It's not just big companies that have money troubles

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through January 31

Tips From The Moderators
Make sure your question is in the right place

What's New at Experts Exchange

New Moderators: Two more names have been added to the Moderator team. One of them is an old friend, PAQ_Man, who has rejoined the gang after taking a year off. The other is modus_in_rebus, and we haven't worked up the nerve to ask how he came up with the name. Please join us in welcoming them!

New Features: In addition to the page showing the winners of the 5th Annual Expert Awards, Experts Exchange has also pushed a page listing the names of all the people who volunteer their time to help out on the site. Also, profiles now indicate an updated view of closed and deleted questions.

New Geniuses and a Savant: We think we've finally worked all the bugs out of the system that extracts who earned certificates; to those of you we have missed over the past couple of months, we apologize. objects has become the fifth member of Experts Exchange to reach the Savant level; his 10,000,000 points were earned in the Java zone. He also went over 11,000,000 points overall.

We noted angelIII's eighth Genius certificate not that long ago; he just picked up his ninth, in PHP Scripting. Joining him as a Genius in that zone is Ray_Paseur. Microsoft MVP Mikal613 has earned his first Genius certificate, in Handhelds and PDAs, as did caterham_www, in Apache, and gupnit, in Exchange Server.

Milestones:

• capricorn1 is the fourth member of Experts Exchange to earn over 12,000,000 points overall. He also has earned over 11,000,000 points in Access, and is just the sixth member of EE to earn over 2,000,000 points in two different zones.
• mlmcc has earned 8,000,000 points in the Crystal Reports zone.
• ozo has reached the 9,000,000 point level overall.
• RobWill joined the members who have earned 7,000,000 points overall.
• BlueDevilFan has earned 5,000,000 points in the Microsoft Outlook zone.
• b0lsc0tt became the 42nd member of EE to go over 5,000,000 points overall.
• rorya and his wife became the proud parents of EE's newest member, Isabelle, on January 23.

From the mailbag: Daydreams sent us a note about Google's change to their favicon:

Scriptomatic, who joined EE back in April 2008, sent us a very kind note: "This is an awesome newsletter! It's the first time I read it, and I did not feel my time was wasted. Thanks!" Thank you, Scriptomatic; it's nice to be appreciated.

Kudos: douglascarleydotcom had a question on conditional formatting in Excel, and got his answer from saurabh726. It must have been pretty good: "Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My coding god, I bow before you and sacrifice virgin marmosets in your name."

We happened across a question about importing Delphi forms into Access from KimberleyY. It wasn't so much the answers from jmoss111 and LSMConsulting that were special as much as KimberlyY's response to them: "Thank You both for answering -- sometime questions just sit there because they can't be done, but no one says it. Because you both took the time to answer I have split the points between you and I gave jmoss more because he answered first." Thank you, Kimberly; it's gratifying to see a commment like that.

angelIII spent a couple of days working on WorkingLate's question about creating temporary tables. His very kind words for EE: "This does not solve why the temp table wasn't working in ASP.NET. But It does solve my issue and that I am 100% grateful for it. I learned a bit more and am much better off for this a future projects. My first use of EE was a very good experience working, Thanks angelIII expert. Thanks thanks, Thanks!"

pkwillis got some advice on a domain upgrade from kgreeneit and tigermatt, and posted this comment on closing the question: "Everything went like textbook; something we can all say is not a given when doing these types of changes. No issues. Old 2000 DC issues disappeared when we demoted them. All gpo's are enforced. FSMO roles on 08 AD and we are live and native. Thanks for the vote of confidence. Matt, I may be posting more as we bring 07 Exc online. Thanks again. I LOVE it when things go right. We all look like heroes. This company has been trying to move away from a limping 03 AD nightmare for 18 months. We are finally there. It is a good Sunday indeed."

An issue with a virus redirecting Google links had james_axton befuddled, until rpggamergirl, with an assist from greyknight17, stepped in. James' comments: "rpggamergirl you are a tremendous asset to this site and my new personal hero! Your suggestion to use GooredFix.exe found and solved my issue by locating the registry entry and the directory that the javascript redirect was in."

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Corporate Accounts Continues to Grow

In July of 2007, in response to community demands for the central administration of multiple licenses and volume discounting, Experts Exchange added Corporate Accounts to its array of flexible membership options. Since its launch, Corporate Accounts has grown steadily, earning Fortune 500 clients including Goodrich, American Express, IBM, Lockheed Martin and Honeywell.

Today, Experts Exchange proudly presents its 1,047th corporate client, the Beth Abraham Family of Health Services. New York based Beth Abraham "ranks among the nation's leading resources for long-term residential and community-based health care." More than 3,000 employees care for patients challenged by illness and significant disabilities by providing housing, home health care, skilled nursing and even music therapy. Experts Exchange is proud to have "Beth Abe" as a client and looks forward to empowering their team to solve technology problems.

>> Create Your Corporate Account
>> Learn More

Tips From the Moderators

The single most common reason that people don't get answers to their questions is because they don't select the correct zones.

When you are posting your question, the two most important factors in getting your question in the right zones are the title and the tags; if you mess those up, by not being concise and accurate, the zone selector won't suggest the correct ones.

But even if you do put in good tags and a stellar title, the wizard can only do so much -- so it is important that you look through the list of zones, even if you have to open the All Topics page in a separate window, to pick the ones that are relevant to your question.

It also doesn't hurt you to use a little imagination. We saw a question recently about some problems someone was having with getting information from a database; the problem had nothing to do with either the database or the connection string being used, but rather an error with the IP address assigned to the server.

Finally, Experts Exchange lets you post your question in up to three zones, so we encourage you to take Nike's advice and "just do it." The worst that can happen is that you'll pick three inappropriate zones -- but if nothing else, that will put it in front of more people who will ask us to move it for you.

Another trick is to select an "upper-level" or "parent" zone for your question. Your question might well be about JSP, but there aren't that many specialists in JSP yet, so include Web Languages & Standards as one of the zones for your question. Adding Java won't hurt either.

Corporate Accounts Continues to Grow

In July of 2007, in response to community demands for the central administration of multiple licenses and volume discounting, Experts Exchange added Corporate Accounts to its array of flexible membership options. Since its launch, Corporate Accounts has grown steadily, earning Fortune 500 clients including Goodrich, American Express, IBM, Lockheed Martin and Honeywell.

Today, Experts Exchange proudly presents its 1,047th corporate client, the Beth Abraham Family of Health Services. New York based Beth Abraham "ranks among the nation's leading resources for long-term residential and community-based health care." More than 3,000 employees care for patients challenged by illness and significant disabilities by providing housing, home health care, skilled nursing and even music therapy. Experts Exchange is proud to have "Beth Abe" as a client and looks forward to empowering their team to solve technology problems.

Create Your Corporate Account
Learn More

We'd also like to welcome the following clients who've helped us reach and surpass 1,000 corporate clients:

LGS Innovations
Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
State Farm Automobile Insurance Company
Hand Arendall LLC
Alberta's Legislative Assembly
Drexel e-Learning, Inc.
The Just Company
Missouri National Guard
Safetran Systems Corporation
EXOR International
Danmarks Nationalbank
Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy

GoodLife Fitness
American Public University System
New Hampshire Local Government Center
E. Pihl and Son A.S.
Zentex
Data Domain
Ipendo Systems
Infinis
Getty Images
Harland Clarke
Pikes Peak Library District

Create Your Corporate Account
Learn More

More For The Obama In-Box

An editor by trade, a writer by avocation and an Expert by happenstance, ericpete puts together the newsletter for Experts Exchange.

Okay, so Barack Obama is the 44th President. He's literate, well-spoken and has some concept of history -- all positives. He won the nomination and election fair and square -- no hanging chad, no votes from cemeteries, no whispers about painting the White House pink. We're for giving him a chance to see what he can do -- but don't think people won't be watching.

Back in November, we wrote about a list of tech-related issues we thought Obama would eventually have to face; now that he's had a week or two of sitting in the Oval Office, it turns out that we missed at least one, and we're a little embarrassed that we didn't see it coming, because in retrospect it is as obvious as the federal deficit.

It's that idea that television stations in the US are scheduled to convert from analog signals to exclusively digital in a couple of weeks. Turns out that now Congress is thinking maybe it shouldn't happen so quickly -- we've only had since 1996 to prepare for it. D'oh! Except that the House has decided it should, so even if we're not ready, it's going to. D'oh! And then the Senate said "try again". D'oh!

DISCLAIMER: We have cable in our house. Our last analog TV bought the dust ten years ago, and cable is the only practical way for us to get anything other than dialup. So we have been able to ignore the incessant streams across the bottom of the screen reminding us that February 17 is a day that is going to change our lives forever. That's not to say that something earth-shaking won't happen that day, but we don't think the switch was ever going to be a part of the equation -- unless you consider it another reason for Comcast to up the bill.

Except for being one of those laws that forced people to sign up with a big cable or telephone company and pay yet another bill that never seems to do anything but increase, no one has ever given us a very compelling reason why this had to happen in the first place. If you don't care about watching dramas about rich, skinny "young adults" in crises of their own making or overly-hyped mediocre cooks using catch phrases that drive everyone nuts, then why should you be forced to either sign up with a cable provider or buy a box so your nice ol' RCA television keeps working?

Of course, the cable and telephone companies love the idea; they're now the only game in town -- and we all know how generously they treat their customers. In the past, if your cable service just plain sucked, at least you could cancel and still see a football game on the weekend and the nightly news. No more; you're going to pay whether you like it or not -- unless you can't find anyone who can sell you one of those converter boxes, so you can't pay even if you want to.

As P. J. O'Rourke once noted, "The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop."

We're also not terribly thrilled with the idea of appointing recording industry lawyer and the Business Software Association's attorney to take on two of the top spots in the Justice department. It's not that we have anything against antipiracy laws or tracking down copyright violations; one of our favorite stories has to do with my father, our pressman and a "special edition" of the paper sent to the thief-reporter from the Stockton Record who covered our part of the world.

But we are concerned about law enforcement people with an axe to grind -- especially if that axe serves the purposes of large companies and industries at the expense of individual rights. There are indications that the Obama administration wants to revisit US copyright law -- a good thing, because it's currently a mess -- but given who his advisers on legal matters are, one has to wonder if it will get better for the right people.

Copyrights are supposed to protect the artist -- the person who creates a work -- from having someone else claim it as his own. The problem is that money -- lots of it -- is involved, and comparatively precious little of it gets into the hands of the artists. Musicians sell their rights to record companies -- reasonable, since they probably like the idea of sleeping indoors and eating. What's not so reasonable is a big company or industry hammering some college kid for downloading $7 worth of songs to the tune of millions of dollars just because your business model -- plastic discs -- is way behind current technology and it's cutting into your profit margin.

Finally, we're a little concerned about Mr Obama's plans to "rebuild the infrastructure". Not that it doesn't need it; we've driven through most of the states west of the Mississippi, and there's no question that roads, bridges, levees and almost any other method of moving things from one place to another could use some work. And being that we spend a good portion of our lives working with people in distant places over a cable system that was built about forty years ago (that drops us whenever we get a medium rainstorm), there's certainly nothing wrong with the idea of putting some of that money toward the Internet.

But what bothers us is that the major players -- the big telephone and cable companies -- have never shown much initiative when it comes to making improvements to existing systems. So the question for Obama and Congress will be: Do we give money to (and therefore reward) big companies who haven't reinvested in their assets, but have been earning monopoly-like profits? Or do we look to smaller projects that won't have the cross-country impact that the telcos and cable companies can provide?

If you live out here in the boonies like we do, you would hope that Comcast would upgrade these 40-plus-year-old lines. But given that this isn't exactly a huge market, you would be foolish to expect it.

Corporate Spammers

kieran_b is a networking consultant in Australia and one of the Zone Advisors, who says that "blogging like nobody reads it is easy when it's true." This item first appeared there.

As I mentioned before, I was the unlucky recipient of a domain which had previously been published (accidentally).

This has led to the unique bonus of a ready-made honeypot. Honeypots, for those of you who don't know, are email addresses that have been posted onto the internet for the express purpose of being found by spammers and then added to their lists of people to sell Viagra and fake Rolex watches to.

Why do I want a few thousand Viagra emails a day? Well, I don't (yet). It does, however, lend itself to an interesting by-product -- legitimate companies spamming me. How? Well, most legitimate companies send out newsletters and offers and what-not to people on their distributions lists - every time you put a business card into a barrel at an expo, you just signed up. However, these companies do not actually send out the emails themselves, they use other companies that specialise in sending out their mail (prices go up to extortionate levels of $0.30 an email) and as with all tactics or industries less than perfect, people do stupid things to make a buck.

Some of these third party companies will, on occasion, increase their lists by using less reputable methods of getting email addresses -- if you search for "email address lists" chances are you will find some hockster selling a few million email addresses for $50 -- if each address you add to the list costs the customer $0.30, that is effectively free money.

Now, I was apprehensive about actually doing this -- I am sure there are legal folks out there who will no doubt request removal of this page and try to sue me. What I have is undeniable proof, full insurance, and an office on a floor full of lawyers.

What I also did was offer the offending company a chance to explain themselves, which they ignored.

N-able Technologies, makers of (actually quite good) remote management software, were the most recent company to find their way into my honeypot. Twenty five times, since April, although I only just noticed.

Headers:

Vertical Response seems to be the company that N-able uses to send out their emails, and somehow, my honeypot address got in there.

Even more damning is the fact that the emails start "Dear Geo:" or "Hi Geo,"

This is not new either, about 18 months ago I received similar spam from a different, high profile, software company (no, not Microsoft) -- I brought it to their attention on their forums, and they apologised profusely and then swept it under the rug -- I am not completely happy with how that worked out, but at least they seemed to care that they had done something wrong. They did, however, try to make good -- so I will not name them.

Corporate spammers beware.

-- Before posting this article, I gave N-able a week to respond to it -- they opted not to.

Editor's note: Lots of big companies spam -- because they can.

More News and Notes

A revised version of revisionism: We almost feel sorry for the people who are going to try, fifty years from now, what happened the day President Obama was inaugurated (for those who didn't hear, Senator Edward Kennedy suffered a seizure). At Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that lets pretty much anyone who wants to write and edit articles about pretty much anything, the entry for Kennedy was edited to say he had died, which has caused -- yet again -- the Wikipedia folks to think about limiting editing by those folks who aren't trusted editors, which in and of itself created a controversy. What's interesting is that the one encyclopedia almost everyone has always trusted, Encyclopædia Britannica (which, it can be argued, is directly responsible by its slow response to the Internet for Wikipedia's existence in the first place), is now thinking of allowing user contributions, albeit overseen by the Britannica staff. Elsewhere on the knowledge-accumulation front, Google hasn't given up yet, while the Smithsonian Institute is finally checking out this whole Internet thingy.

No truth that this is the welcome screen on Windows 7: ... but all things considered, it's a thought -- or at least an alternative.

Talk about a rough crowd: Maybe it just has something to do with the fact that it's not a corner office. In any case, googlebombing is alive and well -- which is a good thing for George W. Bush.

Sorry we couldn't get this to you in time for your Super Bowl party: Fine dining, done at home. (Thanks, Chris!) Oh, and here are all the commercials you missed...

Happy birthday: The spreadsheet (30) and the Mac (25), which came out a year after Windows (no giggling allowed). Are we the only ones who think that sounds like a spy movie? Also 25, the Mac Super Bowl commercial. Speaking of which, how is it that the NFL, which rakes in billions of dollars a year, can convince IBM to give each team one of its new blade servers (scroll down -- it's the third paragraph next to the image)? How about my 7th grade basketball team?

We couldn't make this up if we tried: A collections lawyer is suing his bank because he got taken by a Nigerian Generals scam, and the Brit who allegedly hacked into NASA computers will get to argue he shouldn't be extradited to the US for trial because he might suffer depression while being imprisoned.

We'd love to help, but we can't fix stupid: Following the lead of the Agence France Press in compelling Google to pay to have its stories how up in search results, GateHouse Media has put up enough of a stink that the Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times, will no longer link to GateHouse stories at GateHouse's insistence. Turns out that GateHouse's business model apparently prefers to have a few dozen people find its sites without the benefit of being made available to all of the people who read the Globe's site, boston.com.

Well, that explains it: One of the first things -- literally -- the Obama administration did following the inauguration was to revamp -- kind of -- the White House's website, using many of the same techniques it used during the campaign. It's a pretty good bet that they didn't use the technology that was left behind by the departing tenants; to quote one staffer, "It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari." There are almost no laptops -- the better to make compliance with the Presidential Records Act -- but the security folks did figure out a way to let the President keep his Blackberry. Given that the White House has computers with six-year-old Microsoft software (there's a joke just crying to get out about lots of windows but no vistas because of the bushes in the way, but we'll let it pass), it shouldn't be too difficult to find those 14,000,000 missing emails.

Not really a crash and burn... ... but darn close. Microsoft has shut down Aces, the wholly-owned studio that produced Flight Simulator, and it wouldn't surprise us if the Zune were on the chopping block as well. Chalk it, and tens of thousands of other tech jobs lost in the last few months, to the ever-unfolding financial mess the world is in, and be thankful you're not the South Korean blogger who predicted it.

Signs of the Apochalypse: Digg says it will be profitable in 2009, while Google is still trying to figure out how to make a buck on YouTube, and iMeem is going to try charging uploaders instead of downloaders. Maybe they should try other means of getting their hands on some of that advertising money, or they can just use other people's money.

Nata's Corner

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Heartland Payment Systems, a company that handles 100 million transactions a month for 250,000 businesses, announced that sometime last year, someone installed software in its systems that exposed credit card data for an unknown number of accounts. No personally identifiable information was exposed, but you could find yourself on the hook for purchases made by someone using your credit card in person. Then just last week, Monster.com announced that its database "was illegally accessed and certain contact and account data were taken". It's interesting how these companies always spin data breaches as if it's not their fault that they didn't protect your data. In any case, if you don't, it's time to start checking your statements.

A recently discovered vulnerability in browsers allows "in-session phishing" -- meaning that if a user is logged into a bank's website, for example, after visiting a hacked website, someone could theoretically cause a pop-up window asking for the login and password again. The browser companies are saying they'll fix the vulnerability, but it's worth making sure that when you're logging into your bank, make sure it's the only browser session you have open.

There's a very fast-moving virus that doesn't appear to do anything that has infected millions of computers. Security folks are worried about it because it has spread so fast; their thinking is that it's giving the authors some idea of whether it will work effectively as a delivery mechanism for something really nasty.

Finally, one of the things I've come to live with is the never-ending ability of people to fall for a scam, even though last year a good number of the botnets out there were shut down. Unfortunately, there are still people out there building new ones.

New Certificates