Having trouble viewing this newsletter? View our web version to see it in your browser, or check out the archives.

May 19, 2010 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Tips, Members, Honors and Awards

If It's Broke, Replace It
There are too many reasons to dump IE6

Anniversaries
Ten years of helping out

Tip From the Moderators
Asking questions the right way

The One Who Is Many
Facebook reminds us of a 1990s icon

More News and Notes
A plague on both their houses

Nata's Corner
Data, breaches and a neat trick

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through May 15

What's New at Experts Exchange

New Features and Upgrades: Experts Exchange has released a number of new features in the past couple of weeks, including:

• Question formatting: In all question wizards and edit question pages, the new body text formatting options are available. This includes all of the formatting options from the articles wizard, embedding attachments and having multiple code snippets. See the Articles guidelines page (down at the bottom) for details.
• Advanced search: The Advanced Search link has been added back into the Premium Skin.
• Articles: A few changes to the articles publishing process that includes a change to the auto-publish feature and a new neglected status, designed to help get your article published more quickly. Changes are also updated on the Article Tools used by the Page Editors.
• Grading comments: Comments posted by askers during the closing/grading process will now be visible to everyone.
• Profile options: Several new operating systems choices have been added to the system configuration portion of the profile.

New Genius: Three Experts Exchange members have earned their third Genius certificates, while a fourth has picked up his second. demazter's third certificate came in Small Business Server just a couple of weeks after he earned his second; he also went over the 5,000,000 point level. nobus, who ranks 22nd in the Hall of Fame, earned his third certificate in Hard Drives, and rrjegan17, the 2009 Rookie of the Year, earned his third in SQL Server 2008. Last, but certainly not least, _agx_ has earned his second, in ColdFusion Application Server. Congratulations, all!

Milestones:

• capricorn1 has earned over 17,000,000 points in his EE career.
• lrmoore went over the 3,000,000 point mark in Cisco PIX Firewalls. What makes this significant is that he is only the sixth member to earn that many points in two different zones.

New Toys: webtubbs, the creator of QuickEE, has built a Sidebar Gadget for Windows 7 that retrieves your filters from EE and will query the selected filter every 20 seconds. theodorejsalvo has created a WordPress widget that displays your EEple and member rank; he offered a description.

Kudos: ja95014 was having some issues getting Excel to load, and got assistance from cs97jjm3, thinkpads_user and JSRWilson: "THANKS!!! (I searched the web for over a couple of hours but did not hit on anything even close to the many web discussions offered by the experts' responses here! I will let my "trial" membership run at least a month into the paying version in gratitude, and I may even find time to try to offer my comments on topics where I have some expertise and experience... Thanks again!!!)"

An Active Directory problem was plaguing Dfig until he got support from d20032003, dariusg, Wardy_01 and mkline71: "Great. You EE guys are great. All of you. Best investment I ever made."

It took just over an hour for mwvisa1 to respond to CPKGDevTeam's question about SQL triggers: "PERFECT! Thank you for your quick and correct answer.This has just made my entire day. Again, many thanks."

abys757 took the time to write in to the office:

Work smarter. Work faster. Work better.

Put the world's best technology Experts to work for you today.

For individuals, upgrade to Premium Services.

• Receive professional help for your IT problems
• Save time to use on other projects or tasks
• Improve your IT knowledge through interaction

For organizations, create a Corporate Account. In addition to Premium Service features, Corporate Accounts also...

• Make it easy for your organization to pay for your access
• Save you 42% or more off the standard monthly rate
• Enable your account administrator to manages licenses
• Allow you to pay by purchase order

Upgrade to Premium Services.
Learn More about Corporate Accounts

Get all the latest news from Experts Exchange

To make sure you get the next issue of the Experts Exchange Newsletter, please add the email address newsletter@experts-exchange.com to your address book for a better viewing experience.

Also, be sure to follow Experts Exchange on ...

Tips From the Moderators

Asking questions the right way

We got a note from mplungjan, the Zone Advisor for javascript, a week or so ago that pointed to a question about loading multiple links in an iframe, asked by CalDev.

It's a textbook example of the perfect question. CalDev did a brilliant job of telling the Experts exactly what he was trying to accomplish, including a link to the code he was working with, a clear statement of what he had done, and a clear statement of exactly what the error message he was receiving was. He also posted his code.

mplungjan's first responses came within a few hours, but CalDev was unable to get back for a few days, and his first comment was to apologize for the delay. He then replied to mplungjan point by point with specific questions. That allowed mplungjan to respond with code that had been tested, and his post also offered some non-specific advice.

There was a little more back-and-forth, with CalDev's comments again showing patience and a professional tone as mplungjan dealt with each issue. When he finally had his solution in place, he posted a test exit report that defined the solution, and thanked mplungjan for his assistance: "Unless you have anything to add I'm going to close this question and award you the points. Great work!" and "This is a greatly simplified solution from all others I found on the web with bloated code. The solution was tested and reliably functions in both the current versions of IE and FF and has the additional ability to pass a page to the iFrame using a URL variable."

Finally, a couple of days after closing the question, awarding the points and grading accurately, CalDev took the extra step of filing a second test exit report, noting that the code worked in Chrome, Opera and Safari.

Our thanks to CalDev for giving us something to point to; you could give lessons!

If It's Broke, Replace It

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

A couple of weeks ago, Experts Exchange pushed some upgrades to the site having to do with the Rich Text system -- and then immediately had to roll them back, citing one simple reason.

IE6. The curse of web developers around the world.

The anti-virus companies are all thrilled that people keep using it; after all, until Microsoft gives people a reason to stop using it, hackers and virus writers and botnet operators will have a handy, easy-to-find vector for their work. That will keep the security companies busy as they constantly update their malware signatures; and of course, they'll sell more software.

IE6 makes it easy for the corporate IT types who have business processes built around Microsoft's browser, too. It's a lot easier to just insist that rewriting software to use a browser other than IESick is too time consuming and too expensive -- after all, does anyone really think the CFO knows anything about the intricacies of writing code? -- than it is to actually rewrite the code. Besides, think of all the help desk folks who will be out of work if they no longer fix the problems that won't be created if their users have a browser that is halfway modern.

We're pretty certain that the folks at Mozilla, Apple and Google like Isn't Even Slick too. After all, as long as Microsoft keeps supporting it, then anything that's messed up in Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera will appear minor by comparison. That's certainly true when it comes to security; Secunia lists 24 unpatched vulnerabilities -- for a product first released in February 2001, and that has since been superceded by two new versions (and a third not all that far away).

But most of the griping we hear is from the good people who try to keep websites -- including Experts Exchange -- functioning the way they should, and not just from the security standpoint. IE6 doesn't support CSS2, which means that any site that wants to take advantage of newer standards has to essentially create two versions: one for IE6, and one for everyone else (including IE7 and IE8 -- and even that is an iffy proposition). It doesn't support Unicode characters, which is why you used to see those neat little boxes when you used IE6. Some things you simply cannot do; tabbed browsing just didn't exist, for example.

Some parts of the world are beginning to draw a line in the sand. YouTube and its parent, Google, stopped supporting IE6 in January. Nations in Europe have been urging their citizens to upgrade, and Microsoft -- for its European Union users -- has started serving up a "random" ballot of browsers and suggesting upgrading. "Random" is loosely defined; every time we looked, the five browsers shown are IE8, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera, but you can also choose from Flock, Avant, GreenBrowser, K-Meleon, Maxthon, Sleipnir and Flashpeak. There's even a WordPress plugin that bloggers can install to warn their readers.

The bad news is that despite PCWorld calling IE6 one of the 25 worst tech products ever, Microsoft is going to support its aging Inept Exploder until it stops supporting Windows XP SP3, which means 2014.

They may not have to. At its peak, IE6 owned over 90 percent of the browser market. Today, the three versions of IE combined have about 62 percent of the market (which is a ten percent drop from a year ago), and most of that loss is in IE6. The calls for people to stop using the browser are getting louder; even Microsoft MVPs are calling for its retirement.

Long journeys start with the first step. Google has taken it, but let's face it: Google has a pretty simple, clean interface, and not a lot is going on there, because at its root, it's a listing of query results, and all the hard work is done on Google's side. But maybe if Facebook or Yahoo decided to stop supporting IE6, it would cause enough commotion to get others to stop.

Then we could all get some work done.

Anniversaries

Thanks to the following users for their 10 years of service:

The One Who Is Many

Believing oneself to be perfect is often the sign of a delusional mind. -- Lieutenant Commander Data, Star Trek: First Contact

There's justification in being worried about some faceless entity knowing everything about you, up to and including what you're doing at this very moment. After all, fiction writers like George Orwell and John Brunner have been exploring the possibilities for years. Combine that with the relentless assimilation of everyone into a force-fed hive and you wind up with The Borg.

Or Facebook, the product of an arrogant teenager with a computer and the moral compass of a Wall Street investment broker.

We would like to be charitable and suggest that Facebook didn't start out trying to get as much information about people as possible with an eye toward selling a lot of advertising targeted specifically at you -- but to quote the late Richard Nixon, "that would be wrong." It would also not be the truth; it took founder Mark Zuckerberg four months to launch the site and then move to Silicon Valley, where fortunes are made using other people's money. He may be young, but he was still smart enough to get into Harvard.

Make no mistake: Facebook is all about information, and information is money -- and getting its hands on as much information about you as it possibly can is how it can become what Zuckerberg has described as "the social internet". But nobody -- at least, nobody with more than two platinum credit cards -- is going to give up personal information willingly (ask any HR department about the veracity of resumes). What Zuckerberg and Company have done is figured out a way to get you to give it up without a second thought.

Facebook has made it look easy. They hook you with an invitation from a friend or 23, and then suck you in with enough apps so there is something for everyone. It's a simple formula, really: give people what they want, and they'll use it enough to become addicted.

To be fair, a lot of what you read about Facebook, especially over the last couple of weeks, is really nothing new. Facebook has always had a pretty lackadaisical attitude toward its members' privacy, saying essentially, if you don't want to make something public, then don't -- leaving the onus squarely on the user. Indeed, it's not that Facebook is going to sell your personal information to advertisers, but rather that they're going to let developers keep it. The only way for you to protect your privacy is to opt out -- and Facebook makes it very hard for you to a) not give them information and b) keep it from being seen by everyone.

But that's not the worst of it. Developers can now add applications to your Facebook profile without letting you know -- which allow them to track the pages you visit. Facebook will ask you: "do you trust your friends or trust a search engine?" -- but that seems a bit disingenuous given that it's touting what would otherwise be called "malware" as a "feature". Add to that Facebook's seeming inability (or disinclination) to protect user accounts (including protecting them from Facebook's partners, and it's easy to understand why the blogworld has reacted the way it has.

Zuckerberg and Facebook are aware they have a problem. They've issued statements, responded to [a few carefully-chosen] user questions, and even held a company-wide meeting to talk about it. That's good enough for some people, but not others.

It may be a moot point (CTOs everywhere hope so, we suspect), but that hasn't stopped people from saying they're quitting Facebook and publicizing it, or even from building an open source alternative.

We consider ourselves the lucky ones. We've never wanted a Facebook account (although our buddy Jason pointed out that you can find out some fascinating and/or titillating gossip there). That may be the only argument for getting one in the first place. But the price of gossip shouldn't be as high as Facebook wants to make it.

More News and Notes

A plague on both their houses: The war of words between Adobe and Apple -- complete with a hearts and minds feel to it -- continues to fill up the tech sites. For its part, Adobe is running ads saying how much it "loves Apple", while at the same time calling Steve Jobs the leader of a closed-minded cult for not allowing Flash on the iPhone and iPad. This came just a couple of weeks after Jobs posted an "open letter" that says Adobe's software is closed, proprietary, buggy, old technology and oh, by the way, isn't from Apple. (Jobs has at least a few people who agree with him; Scribd is ditching Flash for HTML5.) Added to Apple's ever-so-slightly heavy-handedness over its lost iPhone, and there aren't likely to be any winners -- except for those of us who sit back with the popcorn.

Who says advertising doesn't work? Alex Brownstein landed a job by spending $6 with Google. (Thanks, Gerry!)

No more homework questions: The British agency that oversees what exams in what programming languages are given to first-year computer science students has decided to drop C, C# and PHP from its list, citing a lack of interest. Here's what some of EE's Experts had to say:

The more things change: An old list of epigrams. We're especially fond of Number 95. Also, ISPs are in no big hurry to offer up IPv6 addresses.

Well, what did you think would happen? With apologies to DanRollins:

Does anyone have a better idea?

The price of security is eternal vigilance: Lest we forget, the Conficker worm is still out there, and still merrily replicating itself. (Thanks, Susan!)

Seeing the light: One can always bank on self-interest as a motive when a big company does something; that it leads to a kind of corporate enlightenment is even better. So props go out to Time Warner Cable, which has told a federal court that a movie industry group was out of control by asking for the records of over 800 unnamed defendants in a movie downloading case. Maybe TWC will find the Golden Path when it comes to finding some middle ground on net neutrality.

We hope not: The indie band OK Go posted the video of their latest song, This Too Shall Pass, and if it isn't the most addictive music video ever, then your childhood was seriously deprived when it came to the "fun" department. There's even a version for Fleetwood Mac fans, and an apology for hurting YouTube's feelings, although their jabs should probably have been directed at EMI for the takedown order the record company issued over the original video for Here It Goes Again. They have been nominated as the official Badgers' band.

Now what will we do when we're not on EE? We've said any number of times that answering questions on Experts Exchange "beats Law And Order reruns", but last week, NBC announced it was canceling the series after 20 years. We guess we could all learn to draw giraffes.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Britney is taking over the top spot of people being followed on Twitter. No truth to the rumor that she plans to celebrate with a 3D photospread though. Also, a "social media consultant" was arrested for harassexting (our new word for harassing people via text messages), and an app for divorce.

Nata's Corner

Unlike our not-so-humble editor, I do use Facebook once in a while -- mostly to look at the pictures posted by my friends and family, so I don't really think about the information I post there. I don't often use travel sites like Expedia or Travelocity; if I want to get plane tickets, then I can usually find a better deal on the airlines' sites themselves (speaking of which, some of you might want to read the list of the top ten travel ripoffs -- they'll seem familiar). Still, I'm always amazed at two things: first, that some parents have set up Facebook accounts for their children but don't seem to monitor them very well, and second, that so many people post sensitive information about themselves there.

I don't know if you saw it, but the police in India arrested another man in connection with the TJMaxx credit card breach. It would be nice if he got a sentence proportional to the thief from California: a month in prison for every 50 or so cards. Speaking of which, California cops are using an email scam to lure wayward parolees into turning themselves in.

Not to be outdone by Facebook, Google found itself in a bit of trouble last week when it admitted that its Street View cars had collected data from unlocked WiFi networks (which gave officials a chance to get their names in the paper), while Twitter had a "glitch" that let anyone add followers without asking permission. Not that anyone really cares except Ashton Kutcher. People should care more that their Twitter account might be for sale.

As you might guess, there are times when I have a bunch of tabs open in a browser (like when I'm putting together information for this column), and the more I have, the closer together the little X box to close the tabs get. But I came across a neat little trick the other day that has helped a lot. With most browsers -- IE, Firefox and Chrome, anyway -- you can just highlight the tab and then click your mouse wheel, and the tab will close. Also, I'd like to pass along a warning about a new worm that attacks only computers running Skype or Yahoo's instant messenger. (Thanks, Bev!)

Finally, I don't know if this will make a huge difference, but SearchAndShare.org has a neat gimmick. You add a third button to your Google search page (it's a browser add-on), and then when you use the button to search, a couple of ad providers will pay SearchAndShare to send you advertising (not more advertising -- just different and more suited to you). SearchAndShare then passes money along to a charity you designate from a list -- everyone from the Red Cross to Komen For A Cure to the Environmental Defense Fund. Check it out.

New Certificates