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July 23, 2009 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Features, Geniuses, Zone Advisors, Kudos

Microsoft MVPs
The latest list of award winners

It's Clouds' Illusions I Recall
MS, Google looking more like -- each other

More News and Notes
No M*A*S*H in this conflict

Nata's Corner
A Harry Potter week -- without magic

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through July 18

What's New at Experts Exchange

Recent Releases: On the release list for the past few weeks are some fixes to bugs related to Articles and the addition of the quarterly rankings to profiles. Experts Exchange also invites you to take a look at the new Expert tab on beta server. Both the existing version and the new version are there; just remember that it is still in beta-testing, so what is there might not be what finally gets released.

New Member of the Family: Benjamin Barbir was born to Lora and Mark Barbir on Friday, July 3. He weighed in at 6 lbs 5 ounces (2.8 kb), was 19 inches (48.3 cm) long, and is the second child in the Barbir family. No word yet as to whether Mr Barbir, the Creative Director at Experts Exchange, will use his position to design a new line of childrens clothing defined by an orange X.

Other from the social pages: rorya and his wife recently welcomed a baby girl into the family. Our old friend, mvidas picked July 4 to get married; and jennhp, known in the office as Jennifer, picked June 13 to marry Russ Prentice. Congratulations and our best wishes to all.

New Zone Advisors: We want to welcome two more members of Experts Exchange to the team of people who help keep things moving along: mwvisa1 and sdstuber.

New Geniuses: Five members of Experts Exchange have earned Genius certificates since our last listing of them. DatabaseMX and tigermatt each earned his third Genius ranking, in Access Coding/Macros and Windows Server 2008, respectively. Earning their first Genius t-shirts were jimpen in Microsoft Access, barryhoudini in Microsoft Excel, and CodeCruiser in Visual Basic .NET. Congratulations to all!

Milestones:

• Last month, we noted that the minimum to be listed in the Hall of Fame was going to be 3,000,000 points. The honor of pushing it over that milestone went to jason1178.
• angelIII made note the other day that he had posted 100,000 comments in questions other than those where he got the "Good Answer" email. That got us to look, and TheLearnedOne, who does a ton of cleanup, is the all time leader at over 155,000 comments. Leading the parade in answered questions is Computer101 at over 100,000. However, angeliii did become the first member of Experts Exchange to go over 29,000,000 points.
• war1 went over 8,000,000 points in the Outlook zone.
• mlmcc has earned 9,000,000 points in the Crystal Reports zone.
• hielo has gone over the 9,000,000 point level overall.
• garycase has earned 5,000,000 points in the SQL Server zone.
• jaime_olivares has earned 5,000,000 points at EE.

Kudos: stevenradams was having some issues with getting an RSS feed to work, and wound up helping out the Experts Exchange community on his first day as a member, but not after he posted to jason1178, who helped solve the problem:

And the help stevenradams gave? jason1178 received more notifications on the post than he should have, and got stevenradams to help conduct an experiment to find out if it was a real bug, which was duly reported. So thanks to you, Steven!

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Tips From the Moderators

We can only assume it's a summertime thing; in some parts of the world, the weather is atrocious, and in others it is downright hot, and it's making people cranky. So we figure it's time to remind everyone that there really isn't any reason or excuse for dumping all over someone for a perceived slight in the awarding of points or a disagreement about how some code solves a problem.

Unfortunately, we seem to be seeing a lot of it lately -- or maybe it isn't a lot, but people are a little less patient. We don't know, but we do have a couple of suggestions:

• Is it really that important? Is one more (or one less) listing in the Answer column worth throwing a major hissy-fit over?
• If you were on the receiving end, do you think your reaction would be one of conciliation or one of aggression?

We'll be up front about it: we don't really care who gets the points, because we know we're not going to get them. What we do know is that if you're the one who decides to make it a personal issue, being correct won't help you if you're the one who starts the rumble.

So kick back, have a glass of lemonade, and treat your fellow members the way you want to be treated. You'll find EE to be a lot more fun if you do.

Microsoft MVPs

We have -- at least for the past several years -- tried to diligently announce the usernames of Experts Exchange members who receive the Microsoft Most Valued Professional award. For a good number of the MVPs who are EE members, there is a direct correlation; their consistent participation at EE has been the focal point of their selection. Other MVPs are members here more out of curiosity; in some cases, they have never posted on the site. And of course, we have no doubt missed a few of them; we apologize for the oversight, and will make it up if you just let us know who you are.

Nonetheless, we think their efforts at helping others -- even if those contributions are in the form of books, classes and conferences rather than solutions to the problems posted at EE -- are worthy of note. From an editorial standpoint, we are honored to have them as members here, and hope that at some point they will join the fun, either by answering a question here or there, or by writing an article for us. And for those who participate at Experts Exchange even occasionally, you have our deepest respect and our utmost gratitude.

It's Clouds' Illusions I Recall

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

For the past couple of weeks, we have been watching the confluence of events among big tech companies with lots of money, big tech companies without lots of money, and tech companies without any money [of their own] that think they will become big tech companies with lots of money once they sell to the highest bidder. Oh, to have such worries, right?

The theme that came out of the news is that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" -- or to paraphrase economist Harold Hotelling it makes perfect sense that two companies with parallel but not directly competing businesses in the same market to build similar products and provide similar services. You see car companies building vehicles that are barely distinguishable from each other, and fast food restaurants offering variations on the same hamburger. And that's why, in the past few weeks, we have seen Microsoft launch the latest incarnation of its search engine -- and there are indications (see graphic at left) that it is actually taking little chunks from Google's dominating position in the search market.

There were rumors swirling around Silicon Valley over the weekend that a good number of Microsoft's top people are in the Sunnyvale area talking to Yahoo -- and that the on-again, off-again courtship between numbers two and three in the search business is on the verge of consummation. Assuming that the Yahoo brand would get wrapped around the Bing search engine, the combined effort would put YaBing (or is it HooBing? BingHoo? BINGO! at almost 30 per cent of the search market -- and would be a strong enough foundation to cause SEO folks worldwide to have to figure out how to cope with two sets of criteria to boost results. Don't be surprised if iGoogle has a facelift in the offing to make it look more like... well... Yahoo.

But Microsoft chasing Google is only half the story. For its part, Google made some news last week when it announced the Chrome operating system to run on netbooks -- more on those little guys below -- so a user can conveniently use all of the Google desktop applications. Curiously, though, it's at its root a browser, and integrating it with the operating system of the computer will probably wind up causing the same thing that happened when Microsoft tried it. Microsoft then fired off its own cannons by announcing that it would make Office 2010 available in "the cloud" -- taking direct aim at one of Google's more succcessful ventures.

(Lost -- okay, maybe not lost, but it didn't get the play it otherwise might have -- in this tech-based version of Sumo was the story about a hacker who delivered to TechCrunch an electronic pile of internal documents from Twitter which, it turns out, was using Google Docs. You can't really call it a hack, because mostly it involved some good guessing of passwords, but the documents themselves make for fascinating reading, if only because the Twitter folks can't seem to decide which big tech company they want to let snap them up for the requisite nine figures. But it does point out one thing: the cloud is only as good as your password.)

We promised above a little note on netbooks and the soon-to-be-on-the-market thin laptops; it's fitting that it's included here because we can relatively seamlessly make the transition from TechCrunch getting its hands on Twitter's internal documents to its founder's announcement that he is starting up a company to build a netbook that is "a netbook-meets-iPhone". It's a gamble; the $64 million (or more) question is going to be whether people want the smaller netbooks or whether they'll pay more for a full-featured thin laptop. For us, it's really a no-brainer; while it is true that most of what we do involves the kinds of things that can be done with browsers and the Google apps, the fact is that we're a bit old-fashioned; we like to work off-line, we like the occasional printed page (baseball tickets, among other things), and we like our own apps.

But we're betting there are a lot of people who will gladly pay $200 for what Mr Arrington is building.

More News and Notes

No M*A*S*H in this conflict: Websites run by United States and South Korean government agencies and companies were knocked off line a couple of weeks ago by a DDoS attack that begin over the July 4 weekend and continued into the following week. Considering the targets and the fact that North Korea conducted a missle test at the same time, it isn't surprising that South Korea has its thoughts on the source of the cyber-attacks, although others are looking a little further north for a culprit.

The attacks did not cause any significant damage, according to authorities, although the invading force did manage to extract some data from its targets. What seems apparent, though, is that like the previous engagement between the North and South, the US will tread lightly when it comes to annoying the Chinese, but for different reasons; this time, the players will include some pretty big corporations.

In memoriam: Walter Cronkite. No one has dared imitate him, let alone equal him; and CompuServe.

Let the Games begin: Most people in the US know that the NFL is big business; millions of dollars cross sports book counters (and office pools) every week starting in August, and while the NFL doesn't officially sanction wagering, it has certainly been complicit (not that that's a bad thing) by releasing a multitude of statistics and reports regarding players whose presence or absence affects the betting line. So too does it affect the increasingly popular (and profitable) fantasy football realm; there isn't a site that has sports news on it that doesn't have some form of the game on line, and there are a gazillion leagues run independently as well.

Of course, frequently overlooked in all this is that the league and its owners make billions, while the players have an average career of somewhere around five years during which they can make the millions paid to professional athletes. It's the job of their "association" -- a union -- to watch out for their interests, and the NFLPA got into a bit of a dustup with Yahoo because the latter was using information about the players and presumably making some money off them, while the players got nothing. Enter the lawyers. The good news: the two sides have settled, and now you can breathe easier before your upcoming draft, knowing you'll be able to figure out whether or not to draft Peyton Manning before his brother Eli.

The Sun also rises: Sun Microsystems, which despite making some nice hardware and some solid software never seemed to quite figure out where it was going or what it was doing, had 62% of its shareholders vote "Yes" to selling itself to Oracle. The sale still has to get past some regulatory approvals, but Oracle doesn't seem to think the issues will block the deal.

Yes, we can hear you now: Finally, one of the US wireless companies is getting the message. Verizon has announced that it will drop exclusivity agreements with manufacturers after six months, allowing small wireless carriers to use the phones. No doubt Verizon is hoping this will get Congress to back off a bit on how closely it is looking at the wireless providers (note that the story says neither AT&T nor Sprint commented), but we doubt that they're holding their breath.

In case you've wondered: There is finally an explanation for how the Moderators do their jobs... and because it's such an obvious seque that we know the Moderators won't take seriously, a list of things that are beyond useless -- like a Microsoft advisory on a flaw it hasn't fixed. We'll add one: a study that shows that the Peter Principle is actually valid.

Notes from the Browser Wars: As might have been predicted, nobody really likes IE7, and its overall numbers reflect that, but it isn't losing ground to Firefox, which also had declining numbers last month, and it isn't losing to Chrome or Safari either. The culprit this time: IE 8. One good sign, though (that will surely make developers around the world happy): IE6 usage is dropping faster than the State of California's credit rating.

Signs of the Apocalypse: 1984, George Orwell's iconic book, was deleted from Kindles by Amazon.com, and simply put, you can't fix "stupid". Next time we go back east, we're avoiding I-40.

Nata's Corner

We don't go to the movies much any more, because it's expensive and the chairs just aren't as comfortable as the ones at home, but we did make an exception last week -- mostly because it's been in the triple digits around here and the theater is more or less air conditioned -- to see the new Harry Potter film. (Mini-review: it sets up the next two films -- the grand finale is going to be released as a two-parter -- but unless you only have a 17-inch TV, wait for it to hit the satellite providers or DVD.) Of course, the expense of going to the theater, which cost us about $40 by the time we were done, is the main reason that the malware guys are so successful. I wonder if there's a curse for spammers.

I still haven't decided what I think about Twitter, but I know I've always been a little nervous about the links I can't read -- and Twitterers make use of a lot of them, especially in shortened form. The problem is that a lot of those posts you see with the little URLs lead to malicious sites. It's bad enough that spammers are getting more sophisticated every day, but now they're joining forces with the malware writers too.

There are a couple of new items to keep a look out for. One looks like it comes from eBay, and even looks pretty legitimate -- except that it was sent to an email address my other half has never used, and didn't have his username in it. Curiously, he got a legitimate one the same day, about five hours after the fake one arrived. Don't trust the graphics; a legitimate email from someone you do business with won't ask you to "send" your information; it will ask you to go to the website -- and it won't give you a link to make it easy.

The other one I saw, forwarded by a friend, was from "helpdesk@email.com", and it complained that she was "exceeding the storage" in her inbox -- which is actually kind of funny because the address she uses is a new domain that most people don't even know. It also wants you to send your username and password in to "help us reset your space in our database." She got another email a couple of days later telling her that her "account expires in two days" -- along with the same request for a username and password. It's just too bad that her ISP doesn't have the resources to do what Microsoft does to spammers and phishers.

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