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March 24, 2010 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Moderators, Zone Advisors, Page Editors, Geniuses

Editors' Choice Articles
The Page Editors' cream of the crop

Core2010
Moving forward, together

Tip From the Mods
Asking all the wrong questions

Nata's Corner
Bits and pieces from the Core Conference

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through March 20

What's New at Experts Exchange

New Moderators, Page Editors, Zone Advisor: The Admins have announced the addition of Mod_MarlEE and Modawatt to the Moderator team, and Microsoft MVP Netman66 is the newest addition to the Zone Advisor roster. Finally, Experts Exchange has five new Page Editors: alanhardisty, demazter, garycase, leew and MASQUERAID. Welcome aboard!

New Geniuses: Six members of Experts Exchange have earned Genius certificates in the past three weeks. Leading the parade is Chris-Dent, who earned his fourth certificate, this one in Exchange. Two members each picked up their second certificates: donjohnston in Network Switches & Hubs and acperkins in SQL Server 2005. Earning their first Genius certificates were ahammar in Microsoft Excel, dariusg in Windows Server 2008, and slightwv (AKA Bert), in Oracle. Congratulations to all!

First Million: Members of EE who reached their first million points in February were noxcho, ryder0707, aikimark, tigin44, ksivananth, orangutang, and Tolomir.

Note from Engineering: If you're using IE8, please take care that you're not actually in "Compatibility View," which will make IE8 behave like IE7. Microsoft has included our site in its list of sites that should be shown in Compatibility View by default. To turn this feature off, go into the Tools menu and select "Compatibility View Settings." Uncheck the checkbox shown in the attached image.

The "Compatibility View" option in the Tools menu can now be toggled on and off, as desired, so you can see how pages look in both IE7 and IE8 from one window.

Milestones:

• capricorn1 has earned over 16,000,000 points in his career at Experts Exchange.
• mlmcc has earned over 12,000,000 points overall.
• aneeshattingal has earned 10,000,000 points overall, the 16th member of EE to accomplish the feat.
• Two members of Experts Exchange have reached the 2,000,000 mark in each of two zones. RobWill has earned 2,000,000 points in VPN and Small Business Server. GrahamSkan has earned 5,000,000 points in the Microsoft Word zone, and has 2,000,000 in the Visual Basic zone.
• chapmandew has earned 4,000,000 points in the SQL Server 2005 zone. He also has over 3,000,000 in the MS SQL Server zone.
• johnb6767 is the 54th member of EE to earn over 5,000,000 points overall.

Kudos: byundt answered questions about counting rows and multiple criteria asked by Shino_skay that prompted the following email:

usbcrazy1 sent the following to the customer service office: "The most value for money service I've seen on the web." Customer service also heard from ciscomic: "I want to give a minute to say this is a great site and what makes that is the people you have working behind the site. The experts, they are great and should be told that. There is no better site, the experts are great with their answers on eveything! Please send a copy to the manager of this site or even better yet to the to man or women at the top, please?? Thank you!"

QPR had an issue with Sharepoint that was giving him fits until he posted it at Experts Exchange and got some help from tedbilly. That prompted a post in Feedback:

mlsbraves was having some trouble figuring out how to get an Excel macro to cut cells and paste them to a new sheet, got help from gtgloner and had already accepted a solution by the time matthewspatrick posted. "Thanks for the reply, I was in the middle of accepting the previous post solution before seeing yours. Both codes work but yours actually does clear the values. Thanks to the both of you for helping me. I've only been a member of EE a few days and I love it!"

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Tips From the Moderators

AnnieMod sent along a tip borrowed from Kevin William Pang's blog. She edited it to show the Four Kinds of Questions we see at Experts Exchange.

The Vague Question: Feature XYZ isn't working. Please fix.

The question provides next to no information other than at some point, a feature ? possibly XYZ ? didn't function the way the Asker expected it to. The problem could be anything ranging from a catastrophic system failure to a simple misunderstanding on the part of the user. These take forever to solve because before an Expert can answer the question, he has to find out what the problem really is.

The End of the World Question: URGENT!!! System is down! NONE of our users can do XYZ! Please advise!!!

Wow. The ENTIRE system? So how'd you post your question? This question usually overstates the magnitude of the problem or is actually only one or two people who have done something silly like unplug a network cable. It is also frequent that the Asker, when asked if he has checked A, B and C, won't cop to the fact that the problem is something obvious, and will spend three days wasting time before saying he solved his own problem by finally checking the other end of the network cable.

The Red Herring Question: How can you check if XYZ is working?

This is one of those questions where the Asker gets in trouble by thinking too much. Instead of simply saying "I did this, and instead of ABC happening, DEF happened instead, and it has to be a failure of XYZ because nothing else will explain it." You will get an argument about everything you suggest, and called all kinds of names because you can't snap your fingers and magically solve the problem.

The Ideal Question: When I do XYZ, ABC happens. I expected DEF to happen instead. Here are some screenshots showing what happened.

This is the question every Expert wants to see: simple, clear, concise, and doesn't make any assumptions about what might be the problem. It gives enough information that someone can look and get an idea of what might be wrong, but doesn't give so much information that you have to spend an hour trying to find a simple typo that might not even be there.

If you need a solution to your problem -- try using the fourth type of question first.

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.

Median, Mode, Skewness, and Kurtosis in MS Access
by matthewspatrick:

Printing labels with Access
by harfang:

"Domain Aggregate" for Concatenating Values by Group in Microsoft Access
by matthewspatrick:

What is Enterprise Architecture?
by keith_alabaster:

Enterprise Architecture -- The Enterprise Architect at work
by keith_alabaster:

Core Conference 2010

 
It was a long time coming, but Experts Exchange's 2010 Core conference was by all accounts something completely different from any gathering the company has hosted in its history.

Sixty members, including Administrators, Moderators, Zone Advisors, Page Editors and Experts gathered in San Luis Obispo to hear CEO Randy Redberg lay out his vision for the future of the site. Redberg pointed to a number of features that are in development, including blogs, screencasts, remote assistance and the creation of a sandbox where selected Experts can help build new features for the site.

But Mr. Redberg also excited the attendees by affirming the company's commitment to responding to requests for bug fixes and enhancements. The two most recent releases -- one of which occurred the day after the conference ended -- include a rationalizing of the zone list to make all of the zone names unique and consistent, and several fixes to the screencasting system still on the beta server.

"We're going to move forward," Mr. Redberg said, "and it's important to us that we do it together."

Special guest Todd L'Herrou (lherrou) gave a presentation on the two weeks he spent in Haiti as a member of a Florida urban search and rescue team following the January 12 earthquake. Mr. L'Herrou described the difficult task he and his team undertook while trying to rescue survivors buried in collapsed buildings. He also thanked Experts Exchange and its members for their support of UNICEF relief efforts.

Marketing director Jonathan Hoekman then introduced the staff members who led the round table discussions that dominated the conference agenda. While new features were discussed, the bulk of the conversations revolved around the refinement of current systems and features. Experts Exchange's response to those comments by members had an almost immediate impact, as plans for simplifying both the question asking and question closing processes were forwarded to the administrators in the days following the conference.

One table that received a tremendous amount of attention was that lead by Mark Barbir and Lillian Moran regarding the development of a content management system for proposed microsites and new sites. According to Mr. Barbir, the microsites will take advantage of EE content that currently doesn't appear on search results, drawing new people into the Experts Exchange universe; the members attending suggested building an interface that would allow them to answer questions on the microsites without leaving the EE site proper.

Another table that didn't get as much traffic, but does have significant implications for Experts Exchange was the Sandbox table hosted by Andrew Alsup. The Sandbox is a multi-tiered development instance of Experts Exchange, that will include an API, which will allow members to build their own standalone applications to use EE without necessarily having to use a browser. Another tier would allow for the customization of the EE interface -- essentially the building of one's own version of the Answer tab. The third, and most intriguing, would allow selected Experts to actually work on the EE code base, developing new features and helping with bug fixes and the refinement of existing systems.

The conference featured a return engagement of the Friday Free-For-All, featuring Mr. Redberg, Ms. Moran, Mr.Barbir, Mr. Alsup, Mr. Hoekman and senior administrator Eric (Netminder) Peterson, who fielded questions submitted through a Google Moderator survey along with impromptu questions from the attendees. Many of the ideas revolved around easier registration, Expert recognition and rewards, and making EE more efficient at the entire question asking process. At the conference, Experts Exchange gave participants samples of childrens' sized t-shirts -- one of the most oft-requested additions to the rewards list, saying they should be available as soon as a vendor can be selected. Also high on the list of Expert favorites: having the option of donating to a recognized charity in place of receiving a t-shirt.

One new feature at the conference was the inclusion of a "create a system" exercise in which the attendees teamed up with staff members to develop wireframes of systems based on a specific user type. Because of the logistics involved, the exercise didn't quite go as well as Experts Exchange had hoped, but most attendees seemed to think it was valuable in terms of giving staff members different ways of viewing the site's membership.

A highlight of the conference was the Expert Awards dinner, a catered event held in a tent at EE's offices. AnnieMod (the Impact Award), angelIII (Philanthropist) and DanRollins (Author of the Year) were all honored for their achievements in 2009. Members also got the opportunity to look around EE's offices.

The conference wasn't all work, however. Experts Exchange provided three optional activities for the Saturday of the conference -- a trip to Hearst Castle, a wine-tasting excursion, and a ride in a Hummer -- and also built its own lounge at the hotel, featuring refreshments and video games and impromptu entertainment from PAQ_Man (one of the Moderators), DatabaseMX (a Microsoft Access Genius) and masmus (a member of EE's staff). Who says we can't all get along?

More News and Notes

You knew it had to happen sooner or later: The wraps have come off the heretofore-sealed documents in the $1.65 billion lawsuit filed by Viacom against YouTube (and its parent company Google) alleging copyright infringement. Our favorite: an email from Steve Chen, one of YouTube's founders, to Jawed Karim, another founder: "Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site." One expects that the British would like to see those documents. Oh, and on the subject of companies ticked off at Google, add Apple to the list.

If you can't buy 'em, copy 'em: Microsoft is looking at building its own "microblogging service" that isn't Twitter.

The ones wearing shirts that have an orange X on them are okay, though: In case you want to have a conversation with one, here's how to spot a tech zealot. But we take issue with the allegation that Apple Fanboys will all have iPads.

They never learn... If the FCC has its way, the government is going to pump a gazillion dollars into making sure everyone everywhere has access to broadband. That's the good news. The bad news is that the systems will still be managed by the same people who are charging US customers more than users pay in the rest of the world for the same services: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and the like.

Ooops. A BitDefender update for Windows 64-bit systems caused some users problems: it turned their computers into bricks. And the FBI has suspended work again on the overhaul of its computer systems.

It's about damn time: Russia has finally decided that having a reputation as a haven for scammers and spammers isn't a good thing, so it's decided to start tightening regulations regarding .ru domains. The consequence, of course, will be to see those domains transfered to some other country looking for an infusion of little bits of money.

"Bing" is easier to say in Chinese anyway: Google may be out of China by April 10. It didn't help matters much when the Chinese government told Google's partners that they "might have some problems" if they continued to feature Google. Just in time for Sunshine Week.

Obviously, not everyone in China is happy to see Google pulling out; researchers in particular depend on it for access to information not available through China's homegrown search site. But that might not be a bad thing.

More from the recording industry file: "Let's see. They play our songs so people will buy them. Cool. Now, let's charge them for the privilege."

Signs of the Apocalypse: IE9 (need we say more?). Vintage tech ads (okay, so maybe the Daisy gun doesn't count). Almost half the people who use Twitter or Facebook -- now the most popular site in the US -- post updates in the middle of the night or as soon as they wake up. And it's a good bet you're breaking a law somehow.

Nata's Corner

I had the most wonderful time meeting all of the Experts who attended the Core conference last week. I'm always amazed at how much all of the Experts know, and at the same time, what great people they all are. I got a kick out of finally meeting my old buddy PAQ_Man, who turns out to be a pretty good musician, but has no sense of when to keep both of his feet firmly planted on a Segway. What is really neat about Experts Exchange is that even though it takes something like a conference to get to meet all of these people, it turns out they are all the same people whose posts you see on the site.

The conference was a grand slam for two people in particular: Randy Redberg, who is the CEO of Experts Exchange, and Danae LaSalle, who put in countless hours making sure everything came off mostly without a hitch. If you have the time to drop them a note saying "thank you", you should, because it's the best conference I have ever been to at EE. Except for a little bit of rain on Friday night, everything -- even missing the famous San Luis Obispo farmer's market -- turned out great.

There were a ton of interesting things discussed at the various round tables -- with about sixty Experts and eight different tables, each with five sessions, there was almost too much to keep track of -- but the things that caught my interest were the ideas of different rewards besides t-shirts for Experts (like the children's shirts that angelIII's daughter is wearing), and some kind of affiliate or referral program for members. I'm always telling people about Experts Exchange, so anything that will make it easier for them to remember and try out the site is a great idea, I think.

Thanks again to everyone at EE for a great conference and a wonderful experience!

New Certificates