7.02.2008

Expert of the Quarter: We're playing with the Newsletter schedule a little bit for the rest of this month; we will be sending out a special edition next week listing the quarterly list of Experts Exchange's top Experts. Then we'll skip a week, and start back up with the regular Newsletter on July 23.

New Geniuses: This is a special week for listing Geniuses; for one, there are seven Experts Exchange members who received them since the last newsletter, and for another, the list includes several people who have been around the block at Experts Exchange a few times, and we're glad to see them get some recognition they might not have always received.

JDettman is one of our first Zone Advisors; a member since 1999, his contributions -- not just to Experts Exchange, but to the Access community -- stretch back far longer. girionis, who received his certificate in Java, has been a tremendous help to us as a Cleanup Volunteer and in helping with aspects of the new site's launch. emoreau whose second Genius certificate is in Visual Basic, joined Experts Exchange in August 1998; he is also a Microsoft MVP. Finally, aneeshattingal, another MVP, picked up his second Genius certificate, this one in SQL 2005.

Also receiving Genius rankings were hielo, whose second certificate is in PHP; lesouef became the first Genius in the Filemaker Pro zone; and saurabh726 became the 13th Genius in the Excel zone.

Kudos:: evault sent the following message to the office:

Thanks for the very kind words, evault!

Simon336697 posted a question in the Community Advisor zone:

Thanks, Simon; consider your request fulfilled.

Milestones:

• jkr has gone over 11,000,000 points.
• CEHJ reached the 8,000,000 point level overall.
• IdleMind has earned 7,000,000 points overall.
• matthewspatrick reached the 6,000,000 point milestone.
• SysExpert has reached 5,000,000 points overall, the second member of Experts Exchange to do so without the benefit of a Genius certificate.

Cleanup Volunteers: 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 through June 28.

Less than a year ago, in response to community feedback, Experts Exchange added Corporate Accounts to its array of flexible membership options. Since its launch, Corporate Accounts has grown steadily, earning Fortune 500 clients including Goodrich, American Express, IBM, Lockheed Martin and Honeywell.

Today, Experts Exchange proudly presents its 500th corporate client, Gould Hall Computer Services. United Kingdom based Gould Hall has been providing quality technology solutions for more than 20 years. Their offerings include bespoke services, packaged software, e-commerce and web design. Experts Exchange looks forward to saving Gould Hall money by empowering their team with 2.2 million solutions and the world's best Experts.

We'd also like to welcome the following clients who've helped us reach and surpass 500:

Create Your Corporate Account to Save!

skirkan is one of the Zone Advisors. She is an author and blogger on design and small consulting business issues, and a devoted Mac user.

For years, designers everywhere have been quietly listening to the prophets of doom, predicting a "paperless society". Our paperless society has generated more hubris and debris than in ancient times when people took a sheet of paper and actually put it into a typewriter and typed with a bottle of white out nearby. Ah, the bad old days. Now that everybody and their mother has a PC and a printer, you can forget that paperless thing.

But what about the human thing? Many of us enjoy holding a book while we read; we love the feel of turning the page and in that brief second, mulling over what we've just read. That's the ambiance of reading and another aspect of being able to pursue a task without using energy or technology to read a book. And that's what a lot of technology makes us lose as a society -- the joy of doing -- like in that Star Trek Movie Insurrection where the entire society turns a cold shoulder to technology. Why can't we have both the ease of technology and the ambiance of the familiar? http://zoomii.com is pretty close.

ZOOMII is Canadian web entrepreneur Chris Thiessen's effort to humanize and resurrect the book store experience. If you love browsing through books the old fashioned way, satisfying your need for eye candy and stumbling across the odd title you otherwise never would have considered, ZOOMII provides a satisfying virtual shopping excursion. The site emulates a believable view of what you would actually see if you were standing in a store and satisfies the need for that old bookstore ambiance. The AJAX based UI creates easy access to each volume, allowing close up viewing, page turning and a feel for the actual size of a book. Plus there are sections as in book topics just like in an actual book store. It smacks of items bearing the sticker "genuine wood".

Today there are many reasons to find an alternative to that beloved visit to the local bookstore. Gas prices, time, trouble, and those prices at Amazon are so much more enticing, not to mention that a mere $25 purchase secures free shipping. But what about the ambiance? There's certainly none of that online. There's no comfortable love seat to sink into, no familiar clerk to exchange greetings with; and no reason to get dressed for public consumption. But now, without the benefit of putting on street clothes, you can regain some of that old ambiance at ZOOMII. It's the eye candy that's been missing at the usual online retail juncture and it works pretty well if you have broadband. If you're one of the millions still using dial-up, stick with Amazon.com and let your less challenged peers use ZOOMII.

It would be interesting if the experience was more inviting: Set up a chat line so customer service is readily available. It would be interesting if the UI included a social network with avatars -- a casual public interface where you can actually meet people and move over to a real social network to watch things develop. Afterall, geeks, techies and nerds love to pick up brainy babes at the book store. Let's see what happens when they bring that part of reality into the ZOOMII experience.

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

My good friend MHenry, the Zone Advisor for software and one of my favorite unknown writers, asked me to help him out with some editorial work on a podcast for his employer, a pretty good-sized networking and consulting firm called Quest.

Mark asks me for things like this for a couple of reasons. One, I'm sure, is that I'm not all that expensive. Another is because I worked for the company for several years; it's an interesting company with a really great group of people led by CEO Tim Burke, who, along with his CTO Mike Dillon, had some fascinating things to say in an interview conducted by a radio host in Florida.

The beginning of the conversation is about Quest as a company. One of the things I liked about working there was Burke's attitude toward technology and his clients; in the first part of the interview, he talks about how the company has never really tried to "sell" its clients on new technology, but rather what the interviewer described as "stellar agility". Quest started out with Burke selling tape -- the kind used for mainframe computers -- to large companies back in the early to mid 1980s, and since then has shifted its focus as its customers have shifted theirs.

"We've never been a company that's gone into the back room and tried to figure out what our clients were going to need and come back and say 'Hey, do you want to buy this'," Burke says. "We've always worked very closely with our clients and asked them what were their needs."

"Most of the time, when we've tried to figure it out and said 'we know best and we're going to try to bring it out to market and they're all going to buy it', that's never... never quite worked out the way we hoped it would," Burke notes. Burke isn't being disingenuous, either. When I worked there, one of the new technologies that was emerging was VoIP, and Quest did a lot of work trying to get people to look at it, if only because at the time, Quest did a lot of work installing network cabling systems in businesses.

It would be extreme to say that pushing VoIP at the time was a disaster, but it isn't a stretch to say that a lot of energy was spent on very little return... until clients started asking Quest about VoIP, and then Quest was already a lot further ahead of the curve than any of its competitors in the area. That's been the company's real secret: listen, be patient, and whatever your customers need, find out as much as you can and deliver exactly what they're asking about.

One of the company's current mantras is disaster recovery and business resumption planning; as I was starting to work on the podcast a week or so ago, another client had something of a minor issue with the power to their office building. Since it was a Friday afternoon, the staff closed up shop and went home, and business -- they provide remote services, and the office functions rarely get involved with the actual providing -- started up Monday without any real issues.

But it got me thinking. Since the office provides the billing support and develops the tools its people need to provide the services, what would happen if the power had gone out on Monday at 10 am? And what would happen if it wasn't just a short interruption, but an extended one -- the kind caused by fires disrupting power and communications lines?

Dillon, who joined the discussion after a few minutes of introduction, summed it up this way: "Most of the time, disaster recovery planning is just around the IT infrastructure. Business resumption planning is around everything else: your marketing, your end users, your customer service center, your PR people, HR, those type of elements... and you really have to think about your end users."

The technology -- servers, desktops, telephones -- may be available in an hour, Dillon said, but "where are your end users going to sit? How are you going to conduct business?" And it can't be that far away from where they normally work; businesses now need to be prepared to pay for gasoline, meals, child care and almost anything imaginable. "It's not just your business that has been disrupted," Dillon commented, "but it's their lives that have been disrupted too."

As it turns out, the other client does have a disaster plan, and does have a plan for something that goes beyond just the power failing, or a main server dying; all things considered, I guess I didn't expect anything less. But I was pleased to find out that come Monday, one of the first things the boss did was to open the plan up and start examining it again; the circumstances at the company have changed, and that means that pulling out the backup tapes and getting a couple of FedEx shipments won't be enough.

Planning isn't about reacting to what happened, and writing down what you did, and how you would do it better next time. It's about evaluating what the worst that could happen is, and making sure that you know what you'll do about it when and if it happens. Just ask those people whose businesses have been damaged or destroyed in the floods in the Midwest; a good number of them -- Burke says the figure is around one in four -- won't ever re-open their doors.

Question: why isn't my question getting any responses?

That's probably the most common question we get asked. We have found that usually, most of the questions that don't get responses fall into one of these categories:

The question is in only one zone, or it's in zones that are pretty refined.

The secret is to find the zones "above" the one you're asking in. For example, while the XML zone has some Experts, it isn't one of the top sixty zones, like Access or Exchange Server. So you need to include a zone like Web Languages And Standards in order to get your question in front of as many Experts as possible.

The question is in the wrong zone.

Just because you're using Dreamweaver to build your ASP website with a SQL database doesn't mean your question is about any of those three zones; it could be about why a particular piece of Javascript code doesn't work, or why your Cascading Style Sheet isn't making the page look correct. So try to figure out what your problem really is, and select that zone.

The question isn't clear.

This sounds simple, but often isn't. The Experts want to know what is happening, what you want to have happen, what you have done to fix it, and what did or did not happen when you did. They aren't looking over your shoulder, so unless you clearly tell them, they will have difficulty dealing with your question.

One final note: The Experts are volunteers, and many of them only log in during their work hours, or for a couple of hours while the family is watching television. They are not "on call" and answer questions mostly because they like solving problems and helping people. If you do not keep that in mind, then they might choose to skip your question.

For sale: oceanfront property in Winslow, AZ: Bill Gates is no longer the boss at Microsoft. Maybe he's planning on a new gig as the CEO of a search company, since he never was one at Microsoft. Certainly everyone expects that there will be a new one (see poll) soon. In an effort to shore up its sagging stock price, Yahoo decided to increase its revenues by increasing domain registration fees by about 350 per cent, which is unlikely to head off the shareholder unrest, which no doubt has been further fueled by a string of executive departures at the worst possible time.

Speaking of the deal with Google, no one has explained how it is of benefit to either company, except that it takes some of the luster off of Gates' last week or so as the boss in Redmond. It's a little beyond us how the good folks at the US Justice department will agree to let the top two internet advertising companies in the world merge, let alone the European Union. There are certainly those who are ready to help.

In memoriam: George Carlin. "There are no bad words," said Carlin. "Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And woooords."

We are accepting donations to buy the .comcom TLD: ICANN, that group of people the US department of the Treasury sort of put in charge of taking care of domain names and such, has decided to relax the rules on what it takes to get a new top level domain since all the good .gov, .com, .org, .edu and .mil names are almost completely used up. Of course, they still have to go through ICANN approval to be approved... which means it's still not likely the ... umm... adult entertainment TLD will show up until at least this January, when a new President takes office.

Harvard graduates get lesson in the value of NDAs and contracts: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apparently beaten back the challenge of his former friends and employers at ConnectU, who failed to convince a judge that Zuckerberg stole their idea and code when he created his website. The company is valued at enough so that Zuckerberg is a billionaire, even though it still seems like there are underpants gnomes at work. The good news for Facebook is that it has passed MySpace in both visitors and page views; the bad news is that people are questioning whether the company keeping score knows what it's doing.

43 per cent of all statistics are made up on the spot, and I have this chart here to prove it: ... and I know it's true because it came from Google. (Thanks, Susan!)

Only in California: A law went into effect July 1 that requires hands-free use of cell phones while you're driving. Local governments and the state are suffering the slings and arrows of a statewide budget crisis; with gas prices going up, sales of everything else are going down (meaning less sales tax revenue), unemployment is rising (meaning less income tax revenue), and there's the housing crunch (meaning less property tax revenue). So the prospect of all those drivers with all those cell phones... one can see the traffic cops salivating like pit bulls locked in a butcher store.

There are times when the word "priceless" just isn't quite enough: but this image comes pretty darn close. (Thanks, Mark!) Also, if you're exceedingly easily offended or are in sales for a big company, you probably don't want to know what happens when the "website is down" (thanks, Rocky!), or what happens if you spend too much time at your computer; and then there's routinet's response to a question.

Let's just hope the French judge doesn't give Li Xiaopeng a low grade on the parallel bars: If you're headed to Beijing in a few weeks, outside of taking lots of pictures and letting us know what it's like, we would also like to know if you had any trouble answering questions on EE... and stay away from those websites, but tell us if the replays look as good on your laptop as they do on your HDTV.

Security Watch: Reviving an old feature, we thought it time to let you know that Charter Communications isn't going to spy on you, that Al-Qaeda is getting better at using the internet, and that the US still doesn't have a nuclear terror czar (which sounds pretty scary, when you think about it).

Sign of the Apocalypse: Here's why an entire generation can't spell and can barely read, and here's why it won't matter: there won't be enough electricity to power those sites anyway; and Wal-Mart now has free online classifieds, competing with craigslist.org. We'll bet they aren't as entertaining.

Over the last several years (has it really been that long?), I've written a lot of things about a lot of vulnerabilities and viruses and security threats, and almost all of them have been about Windows computers. I guess that makes sense, because almost everyone I know has a Windows computer. But there was a story the other day about a serious flaw in the Mac OS X operating system that can allow a computer to have software installed without the owner knowing about it, and it's already been reported in the wild. So welcome to the real world, all you Mac users. It seems like I spend about half the time I'm on a computer dealing with updates to my antivirus and firewall software.

In case you missed it, Firefox has released version 3 of its browser. While its attempts to set a world record for downloads had a few fits and starts, eventually, something like eight million downloads were recorded the first day, putting it among the top four browsers in use already. There's also a new version of Opera and Apple released some fixes for the Windows version of Safari.

For... well, forever, in internet terms, there's been little question about whether an employer who provides the servers, the computers, the software and the email address have every right to read their employees' emails, and some actually do. But the rules just got a little fuzzier, thanks to a federal appeals court in California, which decided that if a company uses a third-party contractor to provide the email service, it doesn't own the emails that it would if it managed the equipment and software itself. Oh, and Glenn... maybe you can get some overtime for the hours you spend on your Blackberry.

Finally, those of you who have wandered through your local Starbucks will probably notice, but not bother too much about, the fact that the CDs that were for sale aren't there any more, which is kind of sad, since some of the stuff they offered was pretty decent. Still, as long as I can get my venti mocha will very little whipped cream, I guess I'll survive.