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June 16, 2010 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Blogs, a Mod, a Savant and Geniuses

Editors' Choice Articles
Four articles that will help you

And So It Commences
Making the most of a liberal arts degree

More News and Notes
"Do no evil" isn't the same as "do no stupid"

Nata's Corner
Fixing Facebook, cheating in school and a Twitter virus

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through June 12

What's New at Experts Exchange

My First Million: Reaching 1,000,000 points or more in May were cyberkiwi, coolsport00, billprew, pgnatyuk and ebjers.

Savant and two Geniuses: Experts Exchange has its eighth subject matter Savant, and the second one in the Excel zone: rorya, who joins zorvek with more than 10,000,000 points. Earning their first Genius certificates were garycutri in Blackberry and woolmilkporc in IBM AIX Unix. Congratulations to all!

Milestones:

• angelIII has earned 3 million points in each of four zones. He is the first member of EE to accomplish that feat.
• leew is the ninth member of Experts Exchange to go over 12,000,000 points overall.
• Idle_Mind has earned 5,000,000 points in VB.NET. He is the top-ranked member in the zone.
• mplungjan has reset the bar for the top third of the Hall of Fame by going over 8,000,000 points in his EE career.

Kudos: freshfordian was having trouble connecting his iPhone to a Windows SBS 2003 server, when demazter pointed him to two articles, one of his own and another from alanhardisty. It took a bit of work, but Alan finally got it straightened out: "Finally got it to work! My main focus was on the server and I assumed that the problem was there. It was initially but your configuration guidance resolved that. The problem was with the settings on the iPhone. I deleted the previous settings and created a new exchange connection - and it worked! Backed up the server and iPhone settings. Really appreciate your help. Many Thanks... Super support from probably the best in the business."

Microsoft MVP acperkins received high marks from Hubbsjp21 for helping him with using SQL UPDATE instead of FETCH: "Your code worked beautifully. Thanks a ton for taking the time. This is going to help me tremendously as I learn SQL... I appreciate you taking the time to teach/clarify."

Noted by ModernMatt: EE was mentioned in the paid section of the Windows Secrets newsletter this week in response to a question about clearing Temporary Internet Files from machines: "For example, Experts-Exchange.com has good information on one of its Q&A pages (free, 30-day trial to view answers; $13/month, thereafter)." MM wrote that the question listed was one from cyberpranav that he answered himself regarding using a script to clear temporary internet files.

From the mailbag: aikimark sent us a short note regarding the passing of actor/director Dennis Hopper: "A thought on Dennis Hopper's passing. He was the center of the Hollywood universe, working with a lot of actors and directors. http://oracleofbacon.org/center_list.php."

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Tips From the Moderators

Requesting Attention

Of all the tips we have posted here over the years, this one seems to be the most obvious, and for some reason, it's also both the most overlooked when it should be used, and the most used when it should be overlooked.

To make it easy, we're going to suggest three simple rules.

If you're going to post something that you think might get you on the wrong side of the Moderators, delete the post, and click the Request Attention button.

If you think someone else has posted something that should get them on the wrong side of the Moderators, click the Request Attention button. You might not be correct, but it's better than the alternative.

Finally, if someone has posted something, and there is a halfway decent chance you're just not understanding what they're saying, follow Computer101's Advice and "step away from the computer." If you come back after a while, and you still feel the same way, then click the button. Otherwise, ask politely for an explanation. You'll save everyone grief.

Editors' Choice Articles

The following articles have been 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.

Simple Linear Regression in MS Access
by matthewspatrick:

Covariance and Correlation in MS Access
by matthewspatrick:

Collating worksheets from one or more workbooks into a summary file
by brettdj:

Dynamic Pivot Procedure for SQL Server
by mark_wills:

PIVOT is a great facility and solves many an EAV (Entity - Attribute - Value) type transformation where we need the information held as data within a column to become columns in their own right. Now, in some cases that is relatively easy to do, other times it can be a challenge (and that is why we are here).

Let's have a quick look at the PIVOT function...


That looks pretty straight forward, except for one or two small details:

1) First up, we need to know the <display_column_list> -- easy enough, just do a Select * instead and problem solved (except that it does control display sequence) 2) Secondly, we need to know and hard code the new column headings as in: ([<new_column_1_heading>],[<new_column_2_heading>],...,[<new_column_N_heading>])

And So It Commences

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

In the past month or so and over the next couple of weeks, about a gazillion people in their early twenties put on robes and flat-topped caps and went through the commencement exercises at colleges and universities around the country. They heard speeches -- most of which will be forgotten, which is okay because they probably won't be as profound as the one given at Lake Forest University's 1977 celebration -- about how it's the first day of the rest of their lives, how hard work will get you where you want to be, and even how the early false starts and disappointments work themselves out.

One of the recurring themes across the country this year is that of how crappy the job market is. If you're in engineering or science or accounting -- the bachelor's degree with the best prospects in the coming year -- you're probably okay, because you're cheaper to employ than the people our age who have been hit by the "economic downturn" of the last four or five years are; for one thing, we need the money to pay for that college education you just finished receiving. If you earned your degree in the liberal arts, as I did, then Anderson Cooper's remarks -- "I too was a liberal arts major.. so like you I have no actual skill. I majored in political science, I graduated in 1989, and I?d focused almost entirely on the Soviet Union and communism.. so when the Berlin wall fell I was, well, I was screwed..." -- are pretty much spot on.

Or maybe not. In a column in the New York Times last week, David Brooks wrote that graduates "will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo." He goes on to say that "Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod."

Mr. Brooks, who gave a commencement speech of his own about a month ago, goes on to say, "Finally, ... studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy."

The Big Shaggy, according to Mr. Brooks, is our emotional side -- the gut. He explains that we have spent decades coming up with systems for describing various kinds of human behavior: economic models, market studies, sampling and polling, statistical analysis, and on and on. But none of that will explain why PG&E -- the largest supplier of electricity to California -- can spend $46 million only to lose a statewide election to opponents who spent $90,000. The answer is in the Big Shaggy.

Mr. Brooks' thoughts dovetailed with an article, sent to us by a colleague and posted by Jodi Enda at the American Journalism Review that noted the lack of coverage of the "buildings" in Washington in favor of the issue-oriented beats. Ms. Enda blames a number of factors for the decline in newspapers' regular attention to agencies like the Supreme Court, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Agriculture: declining revenues at newspapers mostly, with what could be called nanosecond journalism running a close second.

That means that nobody is paying attention for very long. No one cares about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration -- until people start dying in Toyotas; but they get forgotten, and the Mine Safety and Health Administration gets the attention, when a coal mine explodes in West Virginia, which is the focus only until a BP oil well blows up in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Minerals Management Service starts getting asked why.

One can blame the big newspapers -- which are, indeed, suffering through attacks on their most profitable revenue sources from the Internet at the same time costs for everything are rising -- for cutting back on their Washington bureaus, but if you're a publisher in, say, Phoenix or Cincinnati, doesn't it make sense to defend your home turf, as opposed to paying for shallow coverage in Washington, especially when you have to compete for news with not just the Times and the Washington Post, but with all of the television news organizations and wire services? If you're the Washington reporter for the McClatchy chain covering the environment, you've been pretty busy over the last six months.

The problem is that the state of the dead tree news business is changing -- not unexpected, really, considering the 25 years from 1960 to 1985, even the smallest weekly could navigate the change from raised type (that had been around since Gutenberg) to offset printing to phototypesetting to computers without much difficulty. People want information now, and they expect it in rapid-fire sequence; personally, I blame television (22 minutes for everything you need to know, including the inevitable cute puppy story from the weatherman at the end of the broadcast) from people whose concern for an informed public ranks somewhere below ratings, ad revenues, fresh faces of good looking people in front of dramatic settings, being first with the story, and tonight's dinner reservation on the priority list.

The depth of the story -- like the months-long investigation into what became known as Watergate -- isn't possible; no newspaper would devote that much time or that many resources to it. And frankly, the audience wouldn't stand for it; the devil was in the details, and no one wants to read that much. In the age of Twitter, Gerald Ford never becomes Vice President, let alone President.

And that's where both Mr. Brooks and Ms. Enda offer a glimmer of hope to all of those liberal arts graduates. Nature -- and news -- abhors a vacuum, and it is being filled by laid-off reporters working for peanuts but covering those agencies for niche websites and blogs, producing reliable, verifiable work. If the PG&E debacle at the polls proved nothing else, it showed that despite wanting only the headlines without any real discussion of all of the issues at play, H. L. Mencken's adage that "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" isn't quite true.

At some level, people want to understand, and those liberal arts grads are the ones to deliver. "If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won't get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below," Mr. Brooks wrote.

"But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities."

One final thought. Since this is a newsletter, sent by a company that has access to information from some of the best minds on the planet when it comes to the intricacies and peculiarities of electronic mail, we don't include a lot of video. Sure, we want you to take a look at the links (if only because some of them are funny), but what really matters to us is that you read. In trying to track down what some of these people had to say, we found that most websites now don't bother with providing a transcript.

It's largely video; try to find Alton Brown's address to the University of Georgia, and you get a three-part video shot with a Flip.

More News and Notes

"Do no evil" isn't the same as "do no stupid": Those of us in the US found out a few years go what it's like to have the government peeking into everything you do on the web, but now it looks like it's the European Union's turn. Under the ever-useful excuse of protecting children, a proposal before the EU parliament would allow member states to require the retention of web search data, while at the same time getting their collective undergarments in a twist over Google's inadvertent collection of wifi data. Some might even file criminal charges. And speaking of spying, the Federal Trade Commission has settled with CyberSpy Software over its sneaky-to-install keystroke logger.

Other recent examples of "unclear on the concept": the Army intelligence officer who bragged about leaking classified videos and documents (and the people who wrote them), the people who have ideas for saving newspapers, shooting the messenger and the little old lady who doesn't like Pac-Man.

Memo to Bill and Steve: If we promise to stop being snarky, can we get on the beta tester list?

Stop the presses: China says it's going to keep blocking content (though a few get through and it likes Twitter, sort of) it deems "subversive". That no doubt includes the commentary on labor practices and price hikes.

In requiem: Former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.

To quote Netminder, "Ooops" is not a four-letter word: Google's experiment of putting a default background on its home page in an effort to see why Bing isn't gaining on it faster ended 14 hours after it started. Google called making it show for everyone, without the little note that told how to remove it, "a bug".

Three more things... : Apple has turned out Safari 5, the new iPhone we've all already seen but will probably buy anyway (side note: Gizmodo probably won't be allowed to buy one), and helped expose a Who's Who of iPad users, prompting an FBI investigation, not to be confused with the antitrust investigations. Ron Wayne won't have to worry about them.

And in keeping with corporate policy of avoiding the appearance of responsibility, AT&T is blaming the people who reported the breach. We're breaking out the popcorn on this one, because sooner or later, Ma Bell is going to try to blame Apple, and we all know how much Mr. Jobs likes criticism.

Scariest website of the week: IfItWasMyHome.com shows the Gulf oil spill in dramatic perspective. We're still following the Twitter feed though. And while we're on the subject, our friend Susan sent us an insanely simple solution for mopping up the massive slick, while some folks in Alabama decided to not wait for BP or the government. The second scariest website: what summer could bring. To quote our old friend and colleague, Blaise, "What have we done..."

Get ready for Acronym Hell: If you start seeing commercials on television for Chrome or Internet Explorer, it won't be hard to find people to blame. One of them won't be Chris Blizzard of Mozilla, who in the space of a single blog post, with a link to a bunch of charts to back him up,

• accuses Apple of intellectual dishonesty by posting "demos" saying Safari supports HTML5, and then blocks other browsers that are more HTML5-compliant from accessing the content;
• accuses Google of being out-Googled by Apple, but of being guilty of the same kind of nonsense when it tries to convince people it's been riding the HTML5 specification since Day One;
• gives a damn-with-faint-praise nod to Microsoft by pointing out that IE9 will kinda sorta support some of HTML5, but will be backwards compatible (gee, thanks); and
• relegates Opera to irrelevancy, if only by omitting it from his rant.

It's some fun stuff. If this will help you make sense of it all, so much the better; if not, try a decoder.

Two countries separated by a common language: The officials for last weekend's World Cup match between the United States and England got a crash course in English curse words.

Signs of the Apocalypse: The end is near -- maybe. We'll miss it though. Also, tracking people in and around New York who think they should be famous.

Nata's Corner

As you might have gathered, I keep going back and forth on whether or not I like Facebook. I have my page and all that, and it's pretty nice for keeping in touch with family and friends, but just about the time I figure they're not all that bad, they go and redo their privacy settings again, and it's never about making it easier for Facebook to not keep track of you. So as a public service:

1. Click Edit My Profile in the top right part of the window.
2. Click Contact Information in the left hand menu box.
3. Click the link to Privacy Settings just below the box.
4. Click Customize Settings
5. Scroll down to Contact Information
6. For each item, select Custom Edit from the listbox.
7. Change the setting to Only Me.
8. Save the setting.

Repeat for each of the settings for your email address, telephone number and so on. But don't be terribly surprised if, the next time Facebook changes things, you'll have to do this all over again. Still, something also always happens that makes me think Facebook can do some good, but I like my privacy.

Finally! Okay, maybe not finally, because we're talking about the television people... but it looks like the complaints about television commercials being louder than the television programs are finally getting through to someone, because the legislation that was passed by the House of Representatives on the matter has made it through a committee in the Senate.

I'm glad my kids are out of school, because you know that if the Fairfax County schools (which is a suburb of Washington, D.C.) are worried about students using high tech devices to cheat, including copying and pasting from sites like Sparknotes, then kids everywhere are doing it too. It's one thing to get help from someone with homework, but cheating will always catch up with you eventually, unless your career path ends by saying "would you like fries with that".

I've mentioned before that we're thinking about new phones. We actually went to Verizon to look at the Droid, but they don't have any coverage in our area, so it looks like we're stuck with AT&T for at least a little while longer. Fortunately, c|net came out with a guide to understanding upgrades, which helps. We also found out that if you don't care about using it as a phone, you can use a Palm Pre from Verizon and tether it to your laptop for about $25 a month.

I don't know about you, but for the last week or so, I've been getting clobbered by hundreds of "Twitter messages", which is pretty annoying because I don't have a Twitter account. Nobody should be surprised that it's a virus than installs fake virus protection software onto your computer.

New Certificates