6.04.2008

Milestones:

• angelIII became the third EE member to go over 2 million points in two different zones.
• capricorn1 has gone over 9,000,000 points in the MS Access zone.
• war1 in Outlook and TechSoEasy in SBS have both reached 6,000,000 points in their zones.
• BlueDevilFan went over the 5,000,000 point level overall.

Questions of Note:

• A question on SQL injection -- the process of inserting a script into a SQL database for nefarious purposes -- was first mentioned to us by Tolomir. If you've had this happen, you know what a pain it is to fix; if you haven't, this is the way to prevent it.
• younghv read Nata's column last issue regarding copying your old vinyl albums as MP3 files, and sent us this advice from nobus and garycase. And while we're on the subject...

A Corporate Account will save your organization time and money. Don't believe us? Here are some comments from users like you who have experienced the benefits of Experts Exchange at work.

"I was apprehensive at signing up at first. The web is overpopulated with sites that promise so much, and give little in return. However, in the first week that I have had the membership, it has already made my life as an IT administrator much easier." - JaCrews

"I thought I would let you know that I am a premium account holder and this has been the best investment my business has bought. The levels of expertise, quality of knowledge and response times have been exceptional. I hold a lot of respect for this caliber of community." - rito1

"This is the best site ever on the internet. I found tons of solutions for my problems. I'm working as IT Contractor and usually I need quick solutions for the problems. I will promote this site for everyone." - Gabor

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Create your Corporate Account

We had an item in the last newsletter about tricks you can do with cell phones, forwarded to us by our good friend BooMod, who had intended it to be a joke. We fell for it -- hook, line and sinker. But it did give a lot of people a reason to write to us, which is always fun. For his part, BooMod enjoyed seeing most of the emails we received: "Risking having to pay McDonalds a royalty charge, I'd have to say I'm lovin' it."

cuily pointed us to Urban Legends, noting, "The search started because that battery tip wouldn't work for me. It didn't take much to find the mentioned site. It would be an idea to test/research a little such information before spreading it via newsletter to thousand of users. Sure, not everything can be tested/researched, but at least in this case it was all a matter of pushing some buttons on ones phone to see that something is off."

Others who sent us the link to the Urban Legends page included mkbeynon, jimpen, carneyt, blu, and JRWoehler.

That's not to make light of the people who sent us the link to Snopes: younghv, andyoww, the aforementioned carneyt, richarowcrb, MrKowald, aleghart, GaryK30, dennisbagenstos and dhapp.

We also want to tip our hat to MASQUERAID, who actually dug out his Nokia user's manual and congratulated us on "incorporating a 'find the deliberate mistake' feature"; and mabarnes11, who caused us to spend a lot of time looking at other interesting material by sending us to Hoax Slayer.

Finally, in preparing this mea culpa, we did manage to track down the original email that BooMod picked up on. We will only say that we know who the member who sent it is, and we also know that he was quite serious about its veracity in sending it. You know who you are...

There were a lot of little changes at Experts Exchange last week -- most of them having to do with the list of Zones -- and they added up to some big consequences. But there is a silver lining.

We pushed about four dozen changes to the zones. We consolidated a few, especially those that were inadvertent duplicates, like Microsoft ISA. We softlinked a good number to other parts of the list. We added several, including Windows Home Server, Windows Server 2008, InfoPath, AJAX, ActionScript, Groove, Identity Integration Server and Web-Based CMS (for all you Drupal and Joomba fans).

Of course, nothing is as simple as it sounds. There were a number of consequences, and we're going to try and explain them, though by now most of them should have resolved themselves. If you are not sure that they have, contact the Moderators, and they will help get you straightened out.

One thing we want to assure you: No questions, no answers, and no points were removed from the database. If you earned points, you still have them. But what happened is this: Every night, we reindex the site, adding all the points you have earned to the Zone Rank and Member Rank pages and to the Top 15 and Hall of Fame lists. Those points determine what zones you have earned certificates in as well.

As you can imagine, the various queries and processes that move questions around takes time, especially since the processes were running while people were still asking and answering questions. We wanted to make doubly sure we didn't lose anything, so there are a lot of things going on in the background while the questions were being moved.

So what happened? Well, a lot of things. People lost points and lost certificates. Other people appeared on lists where they had never been seen before; most of those issues were cleared up the following day automatically. But some other things weren't as simple.

One issue was that over the weekend, the site ran a little slower than normal, especially where a post to the database was concerned. That was due to the database server working overtime.

Another issue was that some totals seemed to go up and down. That was due to the steps we had to take to do the consolidation. For example, we have known for some time that some zones were redundant, so we wanted to consolidate them and other zones into one, which would make it easier for people to get their answers. However, to get it in the right place, we had to move all of those other zones into one based on where it is hard-coded, and then rename it. We then turned the now-empty zones into softlinks to the single zone. So for a little while, people had a lot of points in a zone they never knew existed, and had no points in a zone where they had previously earned a certificate.

When the process is completed, they might find that instead of a Master in one zone and a Guru in another, they are now a Wizard in one of the combined zones -- and it will be a better reflection of the breadth of their knowledge of the subject.

Another consequence has to do with the Neglected Questions system, and for this one, we're truly sorry, because we didn't see it coming. If a question is Neglected (generally that means it has gone 12 hours since it was posted without a comment), then any change or addition to the zones for the question causes a new notification to be sent to anyone who is signed up as a designated Expert in the zone.

Well, we moved a lot of questions, which means that we changed the zones they were in. Ooops. There are few people out there who found their inboxes full of notifications for questions that had been closed years ago. If there is a silver lining, it should be taken as validation of just how valuable you are as an Expert.

We also saw a number of questions about the "Props History", and what that is all about. We actually weren't going to say anything about it, because we're planning on moving it to a beta server so we can get all the kinks worked out, and when we do, the history will disappear from your profile for a while.

But as a way of a hint, it's a way for an Asker to tell the rest of the site that a particular Expert has gone above and beyond what the points system allows, and it allows the Expert to include those "props" in his profile, if he wants. It's just one of a number of features and ideas that are at various points in the pipeline.

Finally, we have listened, and have changed the "Report Abuse" button to say "Request Attention". Netminder kindly reminded us that we have an Expert skin, too, and we'll get that updated as well.

We have spent a lot of time doing Cleanup, an exercise that started out six or seven years ago as a way of making sure that Experts got the points they had earned, and has since evolved into a system that helps askers, Experts, and EE alike. None of it would have been possible were it not for a somewhat anonymous group of members who are called the CVs, or Cleanup Volunteers.

Their job became a lot more complicated a year ago last February, when Experts Exchange launched its current site. However, under the capable and steady direction of AnnieMod, and with the use of tools developed by BooMod, we have been able to keep EE mostly clean of old questions that have long since been abandoned by both Askers and Experts.

The CVs are anonymous no longer. Below is a table of all of the CVs who have helped us close questions since the new site launched, with their cumulative total of questions closed along with their production over the past two weeks through May 31; we will be producing this list as a regular part of the Newsletter, if only to show our appreciation for a thankless job well done.

You're right, Jerry. The Russian front was a siege: We will give Yahoo boss Jerry Yang credit for one thing: he isn't the type to go down without a fight. When Microsoft came calling with an offer most of its stockholders wanted to jump at, he courted and dumped Rupert Murdoch and even cut a deal with Google as a way of getting Microsoft to back down -- and it more or less worked, but for one small item. During the time when Yahoo's stock was down, financier Carl Icahn bought a bunch of it cheap, and now he's gotten the okay to buy more.

Icahn is preparing for the proxy fight Microsoft didn't want to try -- and if his history is an indicator, there is a very real possibility he will inflict a lot of damage if he doesn't win. If Icahn did manage to get control of the board of directors, his first call would probably be to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer -- but given the choice, Yang could very easily call Ballmer first.

Oh, and not to be outdone... Google changed its favicon from an upper case G to a lower case g, probably as a way of yanking Yang's chain; he is famous for never using capital letters. The switch happened the same week that Google had more visitors than Yahoo.

You think EE has had problems?: Twitter, one of those relatively new services that people seem to get addicted to, is having some issues with slowness, and at least one of its users thinks that Twitter's comments about heavy use are directed at him personally. He may have a point -- but to us, there's something unnerving about people wanting to "know what we're doing", and even more unnerving about someone needing to share with us what they're doing.

Slow response times wasn't the only problem Twitter had last week. Blogger Ariel Waldman told anyone who would listen that the company "refuses to uphold [its] terms of service" because some people who were watching her every move said some rather... unkind... things about her. We wonder what the people who doled out $15 million in venture capital are thinking.

Sites of the week: From those fun-loving folks at MIT, YouTomb, a repository of videos removed from YouTube; and DNScoop, which will tell you that Google.com is worth $1,740,000,000.

Yeah, but we kind of figured that: A study of search engine habits by iProspect and Jupiter Networks that was released in April has some interesting, albeit predictable, numbers:

• Most people -- over two-thirds -- broswe from the first page of results (the top ten). That's up from over half two years ago.
• Only about a third do a "search within results" -- what the study calls vertical searching -- and most of that is either images or videos. Yeah, we want to see that American Idol clip from Tuesday night again on YouTube.
• If someone doesn't find his results on the first page, there is a 50-50 chance he is going to change his search terms, rather than go on to the second page.
• If your website isn't in the top ten, forty per cent of the people think you don't deserve to be there anyway.

So the next time you hear someone complaining about his SEO numbers, you know why: His job may be on the line. Then again, plug-ins like this could change things if they catch on.

A penny stolen is a penny earned: Just think of all the places where this kind of trick would work. Even better, think of all the ways technology like this could be used against the people Nata talks about.

Maybe they'll send us one and we can see what all the fuss is about: The All Things Digital conference was last week, and among other things, we learned that the next version of Windows won't be much different from the current version, except that it will have lots of support for touchscreen technology (kudos, by the way, to John Murrell for calling it "Windex 7"). We're sure it's all very cool, but we want to know how hard it's going to be to type out the text file we use to create the newsletter. Maybe if we keep mentioning the MVPs who are EE members they'll send us a machine to play with.

Word of the day: juxtaposition: A couple of kids discovered that Comcast's website was just sitting there waiting to be abused, and since they were a might ticked at Comcast's dealings with BitTorrent, they sent off a note to the company's webmaster and, after getting blown off like a skinny red-headed freshman on Prom Night, they redirected the website, and are now sitting around waiting for the police to arrive. Contrast that with the antics of the recording and movie industry's favorite hit men, MediaDefender, which launched a DOS attack against Revision3, a company that uses BitTorrent legally.

Signs of the Apocalypse:

• "Guys like us avoid monopolies." -- Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft
• "Google is irrelevant to us." -- Barry Diller, CEO of Ask.com

The newest version of Firefox -- actually, the first release candidate for it -- was posted a couple of weeks ago, and from all indications, the final version of Firefox 3 will be available sometime this month. They promise it is faster, uses less memory, is more reliable, and is easier to use; what's not to like? Also new: you can get a browser plug-in for Google Earth, and Sophos has a security assessment test that's free.

I saw an article in the Washington Post that told about how the people who write malware are using the social networking sites to advertise the stuff they come up with. In the US, it's not illegal to sell a program that lets someone steal your identity, hack your network, or load a trojan onto your computer; it's just illegal to use it. I guess that makes sense.

It's almost the beginning of summer -- school lets out around here this week -- so I thought I'd pass along this article about finding less expensive airfares. Another trick works like this: we recently went from Alaska to the midwest. We could have flown Alaska Airlines straight through, but it was a lot less expensive, and the layover was about four hours less, because we flew Alaska to Seattle, and then flew on Southwest from there to Kansas City. It pays to look around, and if you can be a little flexible, you can save even more. And check the airlines' websites; a lot of them have pretty good deals.