07.18.2007

New Genius: johnb6767, who says he has "managed to fix one or two [problems] along the way," has probably fixed a few more than that; he just picked up his Genius certificate in the Windows XP zone.

Milestones:

• Sembee reached 15,000,000 points in Exchange. capricorn1 earned his 6,000,000th point in the Access zone, and jkr has 5,000,000 points in C++ Programming.
• angelIII reached the 15,000,000 point level. objects went over the 9,000,000 point mark; lrmoore, who has five Genius certificates, is over 8,000,000 points now; and capricorn1 and Idle_Mind both went over the 6,000,000 point level.

Plugin for Firefox: We have this listed below, but it's cool enough that it should be posted here. sundaramkumar has built a little plugin for Firefox that adds Experts Exchange to the list of search engines used from within the browser. It's available here.

From the Inbox: In addition to mail about Microsoft MVPs and cell phones, we received a few other pieces that are worth nothing. One was from MattStarr, who wrote:

The second, which we overlooked last issue, was regarding the ongoing discussion (here, here and here) of energy-saving lightbulbs. StevenCJones wrote:

Finally, our rant about ZoneAlarm prompted Penny Henshaw to send us her correspondence with the company. Her cover letter reads:

If you think the frustration of my experience was bad, Penny's is a nightmare, if only because she is in Europe, and it includes telephone calls. I didn't get one of those...

Earning a Microsoft "Most Valued Professional" designation is no small feat. We have been listing the Experts Exchange members who have earned inclusion in this group for several years, but this go around seems to be something of a watershed for EE; the site's impact on Microsoft's network of "sites that can help" is now to the point where some of Experts Exchange's questions and answers are even included in the TechNet search results.

This is a partial list of the recent awardees. Special recognition should go out to the participants in the Microsoft Excel (seven awardees, including six who spend almost every day at EE) zone; to put it in the vernacular, they kicked butt. Nice work, all!

• rorya is a reinsurance analyst in London who learned Excel and Access by trial and error; he has been a member of EE for just over a year.
• matthewspatrick joined EE in February 2004, and has used Excel his entire professional life. He is a project manager for Verint Systems.
• mvidas, who became an EE member in July 2003, is notoriously private, but has been a mainstay in Excel.
• zorvek is a consultant who does everything but make coffee with Excel. He joined EE in November 2003.
• byundt is the Zone Advisor and leader of the pack in Excel. He joined Experts Exchange in March 2003.
• ShaneDevenshire is a consultant who lives in California. He joined EE in May 2000.
• jeverist works as a business and IT consultant using the Microsoft Office suite. He became a member of EE in April 2004.
• capricorn1 joined EE in January 2001, began learning Access in 2003, and is the ranking member in the zone.
• jefftwilley is a consultant who has spent 25 years in the IT industry. He joined EE in January 2005.
• LPurvis is a cornflake-eating contractor in northern England who has been at EE since a couple of weeks after his birthday in 2004.
• garycase joined EE in January 2004, but didn't get bitten by the Expert bug until August 2005, when he answered his first question.
• TheLearnedOne could have earned his MVP in any of four disciplines; he was recognized in C# Programming. He joined EE in August 1999.
• LeeDerbyshire has produced two mobile products for Outlook, and is an MVP for Exchange Server. He became an EE member in January 2006.
• leew started playing with computers in 1989, and is the senior EE member on our list; he will celebrate his tenth anniversary at EE in August.

Remember those dressy shoes that you bought for your brother-in-law's wedding? Yeah, those ones tucked away in the back corner of your closet, never to see the light of day again. Those are them. We've all got that pair of shoes or pink shirt that we'll probably never put on again.

Unlike these one wear wonders, hard earned Expert shirts are fashionable for all occasions. You can wear your Expert shirt to work, out to dinner, on vacation in Hawaii, ice skating, and even to your brother-in-law's wedding!

To kick off our new photo section (expected to go live this Fall), Experts Exchange wants to feature you rocking your Expert shirt in the most creative, unique, unusual or entertaining photograph you can fathom! If your photo is chosen by the extremely subjective staff here at EE, your photo will become famous on the main page of this new section!

Please email your photos to expertcare@experts-exchange.com. Make sure that we can see you loud and clear in your photo and that you've got proper lighting. We'll take whatever file type and size you can email us. Remember, the higher the resolution (within reason), the better. For all photo submissions please include where (location or event) the photo was taken and a fascinating fact about you or your shirt. Here are some ideas:

• Your personal record for consecutive days wearing your Expert shirt
• Your personal record for consecutive days wearing your shirt without washing it
• How many mail carrier trucks you think ran over your shirt based on the state of its packaging upon arrival
• Your preferred folding technique
• If you had an army of Expert shirt wearing Geniuses, where would you march them?
• What will happen to your Expert shirt when its no longer wearable?

Grab your camera and start snapping!

We had a little item last issue asking for information on cell phone plans. To say we were surprised at the responses is to put it mildly; we can't remember the last time we got this much mail. In the interest of fairness to the various providers out there, we have included the emails below. However, we will give AT&T credit for one thing (even if they really didn't have that much to do with it): during the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, the television broadcast noted that it was the first major stadium to have wi-fi throughout. Fox didn't say, however, that it comes in handy for watching baseball games from around the country on your laptop while you're watching the Giants.

niguelmike wrote:

cachemgr wrote:

Roy (no username included) wrote:

robcohan wrote:

Perhaps the most compelling emails regarding which cell phone service to go with came from the better half. She forwarded to me a story about how all the fees that get tacked on to phone bills that was enough to scare the daylights out of me. Then she sent the Dear Soon-To-Be-An-Ex-Customer letter that Sprint mailed out to about a thousand people. (In fairness, one of their employees told why they were dropped, which didn't stop the media from having a field day.)

At this point, we're going to sit back and wait to see what happens with the iPhone and AT&T. Our good friend mattjp88 got one and said "It is amazing. It does everything. Unlimited data usage just makes of that much better." That was before the stories about battery replacements, email issues, delays in being able to use it, the high cost of ownership, and lightning (which is more about the iPhone's cousin, the iPod).

Besides... it's only a matter of time before the price of them comes down... right?

Two issues have been popping up in the Community Support zone lately, so it seems like a good idea to discuss them here.

The first one has to do with how many open questions you can have. From a programming perspective, there really isn't any limit, except for the total available points you have. If you're a Premium Services member, then there is no limit. However, if you aren't closing your questions, we will start asking that you do so. There is no specific rule; if you have twenty open questions, but you're involved in all of them, responding to the Expert comments, then we probably won't say a thing. But if you have eight open questions, and three of them were asked in 2006, and you have asked fifteen more since then, then we will speak up.

Which brings up the second issue. There are at least two sections (here and here) in the help page that talk about how to grade your questions. You should be aware that when you ask your question, the points you offer are for what you think the question is worth in terms of difficulty or urgency; they have nothing to do with what kind of comments you receive -- except that generally speaking, the more points you offer, the more likely you are to get comments. The grade is how you evaluate the comments you receive.

It doesn't matter whether the question gets answered in fifteen seconds, or if it takes three Experts four days of working over your code. If you get a complete answer, you should grade with an A. You should also remember that "you can't do that" may well be the only correct answer to your question. Grade it as such if it happens to be correct.

It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings: It looks like the Internet music broadcasters will be staying alive for a little while, as the Sound Exchange -- the outfit responsible for collecting royalties from the broadcasters whenever an artist's song is played -- has decided to postpone the imposition of new fees that would probaby force most of the broadcasters out of the business.

It goes without saying -- but we'll say it anyway -- that pricing Real Networks, Yahoo, and the other companies that produce Internet radio out of the market is a heckuva silly way to help the artists who would receive the royalty payments, but almost no one has ever given recording industry executives credit for a lot of sense. According to Real Networks, the change in the fees would cost it $200 million, an order of magnitude more than Sound Exchange collected in 2006 for all of Internet radio.

Requiem: IBM's OS/2.

Sites of the week: It's a little Spartan in the way it looks, but sundaramkumar came up with a little plug-in for Firefox that adds Experts Exchange to the list of search systems used in the browser; and a browser emulator that shows how far we've come. Without being too preachy, content matters...

Why "google" is a verb: Using FTP isn't rocket science. It's also frequently the one thing people don't think about when they're putting stuff up on the Web, even it is the tool they're using. But you would think those folks in charge of managing military secrets would know something about it. And while we're picking on the government, what scares us most is if they can do it, anyone can.

Peeling away the nonsense one layer at a time: People have been worrying for some time that the plethora of sites that take full advantage of broadband access will cause the series of tubes to clog. The good folks at The Onion, who have a history of being remarkably prescient (we can't post a link that has some questionable language in it, but if you're curious, go to TheOnion and do a search for Gillette razor, and you'll see what we mean), have written the story of the crash of the Internet (thanks, Ed!). Of course, it might not be all those videos out there; it could be something as simple as people constantly pinging blogs. One might paraphrase Casey Stengel: Does anyone read this stuff?

Sony unveils strategy for recovery: Remember when Sony BMG took a PR beating because it included some fishy software on CDs it was selling? Well, they're suing the company that developed it.

One wonders how long it is before she changes her name to Lisa: A Microsoft fan named his daughter Vista. Another joke, one that isn't so funny, not mentioned is that she might not work very well either.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Second Life has conference rooms and lawsuits.

It's been a little while since we got after the spammers and virus writers, but there are a couple of trends that I've noticed lately, so this is a good time to mention them. A good antivirus program and some common sense will keep you from having any problems with them for the most part, but I see a lot of otherwise smart people who sometimes only have one of those, and a good number who don't have either.

The first trend I've seen is a huge upswing in the number of spammers who are using PDF files to get past the antispam filters. The reason: since businesses use PDF files to transmit documents, emails with them attached won't get filtered. Since they don't get filtered, the spam gets through. And since the cost of sending out the garbage is so on a cost per email basis, it only takes a few people getting suckered in for the spammers to make a profit.

So why can't the spam filters recognize a spam PDF from a fake one? Well, they can -- but the switch to PDF files from images with the pump and dump scheme or the latest diet drug is fairly recent, so most antivirus programs haven't caught up with the spammers yet.

The other trend that seems to be showing up in my in box is the fake ECard -- the web-based electronic "postcards" that everyone seemed to send me on my birthday (at $3 a pop at the local Hallmark store, plus the hassle of having to buy stamps to send it, I can understand why people sent them). You never actually receive the ecard; you have to visit the legitimate sites (the two I saw most often were the World Wildlife Fund and Blue Mountain) to pick up your card.

The virus/bot folks are counting on the fact that most people don't really look at the URL of the link when they click on it. So what happens is two things. When the link is clicked, you have just verified your email address. While sending out spam isn't expensive, there are costs, like bandwidth, so if a spammer can make sure his message is getting delivered, that's a plus. Worse, though, is that when you click on what looks like a legitimate link but isn't, you can wind up at a website that downloads software that will turn your computer into a zombie that sends out more of the spam itself. The bottom line: if you get email from someone you don't know, or haven't given your address to, just delete it.

Finally, there's a new trojan out there that is hitting Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts, using them to create and send spam. Apparently, the people who have devised this little trojan have also figured out how to bypass the CAPTCHA system that prevent new accounts from being created.