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March 3, 2010 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Core, Geniuses, MVPs and Kudos

Editors' Choice Articles
Two Page Editors' selections

My First Million
That seven-digit number is a biggie

What Makes Google Tick
It's all about the context

Tip From the Mods
How you can particpate at Core 2010

More News and Notes
But it's in the business plan... honest

Nata's Corner
That's it -- go ahead and tell the crooks you're gone

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through February 27

What's New at Experts Exchange

Register a Friend for FREE!: Have a friend who knows a thing or two about technology? Have them register as an Expert at Experts Exchange for FREE! Just send them this link: http://www.experts-exchange.com/becomeAnExpert.jsp.

How it works:

• New Experts can answer questions and write articles to unlock premium features such as asking questions and searching the knowledgebase
• To unlock these features and become a Qualified Expert, new Experts must earn 10,000 points (about 7 questions)
• fter that, they'll need to earn just 3,000 points each month to keep free membership and access to premium features

Share this link with your friends and colleagues! http://www.experts-exchange.com/becomeAnExpert.jsp

New Geniuses: We have two newcomers to the list of people who have earned Genius certificates. bluntTony, who just celebrated his first anniversary at Experts Exchange, has gone over the 1,000,000 point level in Active Directory, while ryder0707 has earned his Genius ranking in VMWare.

Microsoft MVPs: Two more Microsoft MVPs have joined the already-strong group of people who answer questions in the Excel zone, pushing the number of active MVPs there to over a dozen. Please join us in welcoming RonCoderre and Tom_Urtis to the Experts Exchange family.

Milestones:

• capricorn1 is only the second member of Experts Exchange to earn 3,000,000 points in each of three zones. He has accomplished the feat in MS Access, Access Coding/Macros and Access Forms.
• BlueDevilFan has earned over 7,000,000 points in the Outlook zone.
• Ray_Paseur has earned 2,000,000 points two zones: PHP and PHP and Databases. Only twelve members of EE have accomplished that.
• rindi is the 30th member of Experts Exchange to earn 8,000,000 points.
• GrahamSkan went over the 7,000,000 point level.

Kudos: Who says you can't go home again? merry_mod spent the long weekend at her alma mater, St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY, participating in the school's 28th annual Teddi Dance for Love, helping raise over $45,000 for Camp Good Days and Special Times, an organization for children and their families who are touched by cancer and other life challenges. Thanks for carrying the Badger banner, m_m!

acperkins is one of those people who comes across a little gruff on occasion, but when it gets down to it, he knows his stuff. That was evident in a question about SQL queries and XML paths asked by Valimai: "Back to your last post, it is fantastic! I was able to convert your query to a sql query where the xmlpublish is a field in the database. So glad an xpath method was found, better for performance too. Thank you so much for taking the time to find it and post it."

DarrenMagicx registered at Experts Exchange as a Trial Member about a week ago, and immediately asked his first question -- about passing a URL through a form -- and it took mplungjan all of about 47 minutes to post a solution. Before the hour was over, DarrenMagicx had closed the question, saying, "YOU ROCK!!!!! I WAS TRYING TO DO THIS FOR DAYS AND YOU JUST MADE ME VERY HAPPY!!!!! THANK YOU!!!" and "YOU RULLLEEE :) Keep up the greeeatt A++ Job! Thanks!" That pretty much says it all.

Fun and games: The winter weather hit just about everywhere, and as is par for the course, there was a Badger there to help clean up the mess. He was joined by Tolomir's wife, Arina, and their two sons, Peter and Sascha. Dad was behind the camera.

Speaking of Tolomir, he also sent along a tip about a tool for the people who are just beginning to play around with ribbons in the Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2010 suites. "It's called Ribbon Hero", he says. Ribbon Hero is an unsupported concept test for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel 2007 and 2010, designed to help you boost Office skills and knowledge. "You can play games (aka "challenges"), score points, and compete with your friends while improving your productivity with Office", he says. He suggests using the Office 2010 Beta.

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Tips From the Moderators

"Respect"

Respect is an interesting concept in an online community that is essentially staffed and managed by unpaid volunteers. Most of the Experts (and all of the Admins, Moderators, Zone Advisors, Page Editors, and Cleanup Volunteers) who answer your questions and keep the site running smoothly do so almost purely out of a desire to help others. Our payment, besides points towards a free membership and an occasional t-shirt, is the thanks that come from truly grateful Askers whose day we make just a bit brighter by helping.

But beyond the "thanks" messages is another commodity and that's respect. I will not lie ... most of us also do this because it's a way of earning respect amoung our peers. Being the top dog in a zone or in the Hall of Fame or being asked to server as a CV, PE, or ZA means that your peers have recognized your skills and abilities and confer upon you status and respect. While it is not as tangible as points or t-shirts or "Thank Yous" it definitely exists and plays a major role in the EE Community.

This is also why so many people get so upset when posts or ideas are not responded to, or ignored completely. More than just simple rudeness, it conveys a lack of respect for the time and energy that person has put forth attempting to help you. And when you abuse or lose that respect between the parties it leads to conflicts and, worse, apathy. Ignoring the ideas, opinions, and solutions from a viable volunteer community will quickly destroy whatever motivation exists in that community to continue to help you.

So as you go about your day and participate on EE, please remember the above. Be kind, be courteous, be professional, but above all, be respectful towards one another.

WhackAMod
Site Administrator

From March 10 through March 14, most of us will be attending the second Core Conference. That doesn't mean we won't have our laptops handy, though, but we do ask that you bear with us for a few days if we don't get to your issue in Community Support right away.

Thanks!

Editors' Choice Articles

The following articles were designated as Editors' Choice by the Page Editors. For additional information on Articles and making sure your masterpiece is up to EE's publishing standards, check out the Article Guidelines and Article Tips zone.

A Guide to the PMT, FV, IPMT and PPMT Functions
by mwvisa1:

How to Interpret Customer Satisfaction Surveys
by harfang:

My First Million

In virtually every issue we send out, there is some mention (and sometimes a lot of mention) of points; it's pretty reasonable that if you're going to keep score, then people want to know how they're doing. But the other day, we got an email that said "hey, I got my million points, and I wasn't listed! How come?! We explained that we list when people get their Genius certificates, and then list when they reach various milestones after that; we don't list so many in order to make sure that the casual reader understand that it's something pretty rare when a member has five million points overall, or gets 4,000,000 in a single zone.

But that got us thinking. Since we're unlikely to live long enough to earn 1,000,000 points overall (we have about 340,000, give or take), why not start posting when people first get over that seven-figure hump? After all, they say the first million is always the hardest. So every month, we'll start posting a list of the people who earned their 10 to the seventh power in the previous month. And in case we forget, please accept our sincere congratulations!

What Makes Google Tick

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

Right up front: I love Google. Like any other site, it occasionally frustrates us because we can't find what we want -- but our guess is that in those cases, it's usually because it doesn't exist on the Internet. The other day, I wanted to find out why someone had left a particular job after fifteen years doing what seems to us to be a great gig -- and I looked through about twenty pages of results without any luck. Then again, searching for my father's editorials doesn't yield anything either -- probably because even though some of them appeared on line (about two years' worth, give or take a few months), we really didn't know a whole lot about where this internet thingy was going to go (okay, maybe we did, but the technology didn't exist, so it was all just a cool idea), and Google hasn't figured out a way to go back and mine long since deleted files. Who knew?

It was fascinating, then, to get a glimpse from Wired author Steven Levy behind the curtain of how Google figures out what to show me. Some of it's a no-brainer (okay... it's a brainer, but it's pretty easy to figure out conceptually); for example, they know my IP address, and they probably have as good a system for locating, geographically, where my IP is. So if I'm looking for Chinese restaurants, their neat little system (which someday will no doubt be referred to as The Algorithm much like that monstrous set of computer programs was called The Matrix) knows that I'm probably more interested in one in central California than I am in, say, central South Dakota. It will show me both, but the one that's closer is going to be higher up on the list of results; in short, context matters.

Turns out that it matters a lot more than what put Google on the Internet's Top 100 With a Bullet in the first place: Page Rank (also capitalized most of the time). "[Google co-founder Larry] Page's now legendary insight was to rate pages based on the number and importance of links that pointed to them -- to use the collective intelligence of the Web itself to determine which sites were most relevant", Mr. Levy writes. It's a neat trick: I and a bunch of other people link to, say, the New York Times and the more people who do that, the more important the Times becomes. The more content the Times comes up with, the more chances it has to be linked to -- and each link ups the overall relevance of the Times as a source of information.

A couple of other things are similarly straightforward in terms of how relevant a site is to whatever a user is searching for: the title of the page, the text of an actual link (the part that starts with http:), and later headings of text on the page. And it's all old news.

In the dozen or so years since Page and Brin started their company, The Algorithm has been tweaked hundreds, even thousands of times. Possibly the most significant evolution in The Algorithm has been Google's use of its own results. After all, from the user's perspective, the results 225 pages down don't really matter much -- unless what is 225 pages down is what you're looking for. So Google has built into its calculations the success (or failure) of a search, based on whether the searcher changes a word or two (and what words are changed to what) and on whether the searcher actually clicks on the results.

At any given time, there are dozens of adjustments to the algorithm being tested; when about a billion searches are conducted every day, that's a pretty big lab to test in, and you can be pretty sure that the results you're getting are going to be pretty solid. When you think consider that typing in "new" will get you an entirely different set of results compared to "new york", which will be still different from "new york post", which will be different from "new york post office", that's fairly profound no matter how you cut it.

Of course, the success of Google has attracted the attention of a company used to fighting -- and winning -- wars with other companies that temporarily dominate a market (anyone remember Netscape? WordPerfect?). Microsoft, whose Bing search system currently has about 11 per cent of the market, will soon be providing the search for Yahoo, doubling its penetration to about 1/3 that of Google's. But far more interesting to watch will be the clash between two very big and very different companies. If there's a company with the resources to outlast Google, it is the one in Redmond. What's also true is that sometimes, spending a significant percentage of one's resources to fight a battle one cannot win is worse than just taking what you can get.

When Microsoft buried Netscape and owned the browser market, there were fewer reasons to not use Internet Explorer, and Microsoft had a natural advantage: it could include IE with its operating system, providing a level of convenience to a comparatively innocent group of consumers. Today, IE has a reputation as a vector for malware and has a host of worthy competitors (including Google's own browser) that perform as well or better and do not suffer from having one company's "standards" imposed on the browsing experience.

Similarly, Netscape wasn't nearly as appreciative of Microsoft as a competitior -- a mistake in evaluating Microsoft that Google is unlikely to make, and indeed, the fact that they keep adjusting The Algorithm to find better results is an indication that they take other search engines pretty seriously. Another problem Netscape had was that it was slow to respond to a threat it didn't see until it was too late. Google has been anticipating Microsoft's incursion into the search market all along.

Finally, Microsoft has a lot of distractions Google doesn't have. It's supporting four operating systems (plus the server, mobile and XBox versions) and hundreds of other programs and systems. It is acquiring (and trying to integrate) other companies to fill in the blanks in its technologies (like Farecast, referred to in Mr. Levy's article). Only Adobe comes close to matching Microsoft for feature creep. Microsoft is perfectly content to take money from China (and turn a bit of a blind eye to all of the pirated software being manufactured there), which is probably good for the bottom line but which could also bite it on the butt if the Chinese decide they don't want to send as much money to Washington. And of course, there are all those people writing viruses, infestations, spyware, trojans and other attack vectors exploiting holes in Microsoft's systems. Redmond has a lot on its plate.

For the rest of us, well... do you prefer Coke or Pepsi?

More News and Notes

But it's in the business plan... honest: Yelp, the online review website that got serious in acquisition talks with Google and then walked away from a half a billion dollar Christmas bonus, may be thinking woulda shoulda coulda right about now, as a blistering newspaper article alleging extortion by Yelp salespeople (a few people thought it was a hoax) was followed a week later by a class-action lawsuit. Whether the allegations are true or not is almost beside the point; it's the kind of damage to a reputation that can turn $500 million into $50,000 in a hurry.

Sharing a common experience: There has to be something in your real world experience that resonates the truth contained in these images.

Facebook announces full employment program for lawyers: The currently-dominant social networking site has somehow quietly patented a "news feed" involving the updates people make to their status. While there is a lot of hand-wringing going on, to all appearances the patent is more about the algorithm behind the ranking of the updates than it is the actual feed system itself. And yes, we did link to a Google Buzz item, we did so only after the issues regarding its privacy flaws had been mostly mitigated. Still, as our favorite poet says, there's a fine line between Saturday night and Sunday morning, and a finer one between doing no evil and letting evil happen.

Now there's a shocker... NOT: Twitter is going to shove ads at you.

Big Brother IS watching: At least, he apparently was in the Lower Merion school district in Pennsylvania, where officials are accused of spying on students using district-issued laptop computers. The district says it only remotely activates them if they've been stolen, but one student was told had engaged in improper behavior at home, and the evidence to support the allegation was images from the webcam. The FBI is now involved, a judge has ordered the district to turn off the feature, and there's one vice-principal who says she didn't do it, but the students aren't buying it.

They've obviously never been to a Giants-Dodgers game: California's legislature is about to prohibit cussing for the first week in March. While we're on the subject of athletes, kudos to Kelly Kulick, who we'll bet on against JH any day of the week. Also, Steve Holcomb, the driver of the gold-medal winning US 4-man bobsled team not only plays video games; he's a Microsoft Certified Professional as well.

Our favorite is the checklist: New Scientist gave away a book for hearing about the Most Underrated Invention of all time, and on the matter of lists, Time magazine has its fifty top websites (Google at 11th?) and ten Internet blunders, while ChannelWeb has fifteen poorly named products.

Italian court shuts down Internet: Three Google executives have been convicted of invading privacy as being responsible for the hosting of a YouTube video. Google will appeal, but the implication is that the owners of hosting services are responsible for the content. Of course, the fact that the European Union has laws giving hosting companies protection didn't matter. No wonder they've had 61 governments since World War II. Also on the subject of shutdowns, Microsoft got a court order to chop off the head of a bot net.

It had to be somebody's idea of a good idea: It took the price of oil going to about $100 a barrel and a financial crisis not seen in 80 years for it to happen, but after General Motors couldn't convince the Chinese to take the Hummer off its hands, GM has decided to stop building the behemoth gas-guzzlers.

Signs of the Apocalypse: We're not much on conspiracies, but the Law of Unintended Consequences has always seemed to contain enough truth to it that the allegation that the US Government is at least in part to blame for the cyberattacks on US companies is perfectly reasonable. Also, Barbie is a techie, and the original YouTube video of Rick Astley was removed for violating the site's terms of service. And yes, you've been rickrolled.

Nata's Corner

Before you get started reading this, take the Facebook compulsion quiz. I'm thinking about creating an Experts Exchange compulsion quiz just to have my other half take it.

The other day, during my morning coffee, I was watching the local "good morning" show on the tube when they had a report about a site called PleaseRobMe.com, a site that posts all the twits from Twitter that tell the world you've gone someplace else for a period of time during which your home is now empty. I looked, and I'll admit that I was a bit torn. On the one hand, it shows that for all the crying and hand-wringing people do about their privacy, they're not really very smart about it, and in that regard, they almost deserve what they get. On the other hand, do people really need to be reminded by someone who tacitly makes it easier for criminals (we all KNOW about those crazy crack-head druggies who need a fix, right?) to find a house to break into (like they can figure out how to turn on a computer, much less find a free wireless connection that's just down the street from a neighborhood they have enough sense to target as an opportunity).

Of course... it was just a few minutes later when I saw a photo, posted on Facebook from a basketball game, of my son and his daughter, taken by his wife, saying "we're at the game right now!" -- which happens to be about an hour away from where he lives. Now, Facebook isn't quite the same, but it's close enough that I really need to have a talk with that boy. You would think he would know better (he is a part-time police officer), but apparently, people still feel invincible -- until it happens to them.

I think my other problem is that while I understand the whole point to the site, and I understand that Twitter just builds the technology and that it's up to people to use technology responsibly, I wonder if companies who are making a profit (yes, I know. Twitter doesn't make a profit, but they do have $50 million to play around with) shouldn't be expected to be responsible too. One of the things I've always liked about EE is that EE doesn't want to be known as a site where you can hack the password to your boss's desktop or your ex-girlfriend's email. I know some of the top Experts pretty well, and I know darn well they know how to do it, but they're ethical people, and they work hard to make sure that EE is an ethical site. But that's not true for a lot of other sites. I just wonder if there is something that should be done about them.

I'm also not quite sure what to make of Chatroulette, started by a 17-year-old Russian who says he just wanted to build something new and "not boring." So far, based on the images I've seen, I don't think I'm going to be racing out to buy a webcam any time soon. The site does have its fans, but there are more than a few people a little bit concerned for their kids' well-being.

Finally, if your blog or website has disappeared from Google's results, I came across an interesting item from a Google employee who had it happen to him, and what he did about it. Also, we can't let this issue pass without warning you about yet another Facebook virus. This one tells you that you're not logged in, and wants you to enter your password. Don't take the bait; if you're logged in, then log out and use the normal process for logging back in.

New Certificates