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September 2, 2009 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Admins, a Mod, and Social Notes

Using Regular Expressions in Visual Basic
matthewspatrick explains the RegExp class

The future ain't what it used to be
ericpete on Berra, Brunner and Toffler

More News and Notes
The chance to do the right thing

Nata's Corner
Keeping up with the kids -- safely

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through August 29

What's New at Experts Exchange

Changes: We are pleased to announce the addition of a number of people to the Administrator team at Experts Exchange. Last issue, we noted the promotion of WhackAMod; also joining the team are modus_operandi, will_see and Articles101. Also, mod-ems is the newest member of the Moderator group. Welcome aboard, folks!

Milestones: angelIII isn't the first member of Experts Exchange to earn points such that he has a three followed by a bunch of zeros, but he is the first to have the three followed by seven of them, as he went over the 30,000,000 point level. The question that put him over the top was asked by finance_teacher. Other accomplishments:

• Two members reached the 5,000,000 point level overall in the past two weeks, and the contrast between them is noteworthy. PeteLong is the highest ranking member of Experts Exchange who does not have a Genius certificate; Mestha retired his Sembee account while at the top of the Hall of Fame, and has made the top 50 in just nine months. He has earned over 4,000,000 points in the Exchange zone.
• ozo has earned 10,000,000 points overall.
• peter57r has earned 8,000,000 points since joining Experts Exchange.
• acperkins has reached 7,000,000 points overall.
• aneeshattingal has earned at least 2,000,000 points in both the MS SQL Server and SQL Server 2005 zones. Only eight other members have accomplished the feat.

Social Notes: At left, Charlotte Alice Leahy became the newest prospective Genius at Experts Exchange when she made her appearance as the daughter of Susan and David Leahy on August 19.

At right, the former Alicia Murphy became the bride of Mark Schmiede on August 9. Congratulations and best wishes to all!

Kudos: Jsmply ran some antivirus software after discovering some infections, and wound up with a machine that gave some odd error messages. johnb6767 and rpggamergirl stepped up, and the result was the following comment:

We have been pleasantly surprised lately by some of the contributions made by some of the people who work in EE's offices; it's been a long time coming. However, we never expected to find ourselves someone we can go to about a very tricky subject. StevenDesigner posted a question about "tempermental inputs in Maya, and got some advice from Rh1no who, it turns out, is one of the customer service folks. SteveDesigner's response:

From the Inbox: Susan Kirkland's item last issue about Macs raised the hackles of DaveBaldwin:

Susan's response:

Fun and games: From jason1178: Something everyone should pass along to family members.

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Tips From the Moderators

We often see questions that go on for several rounds of comments before the Expert can finally dig up enough information to actually begin solving the member's question. In some cases that's unavoidable, since the member may not really know what type of information the Experts need. In many cases, however, the EE member asks a question like:

How to populate my array from a textfile?

This can be answered thousands of different ways. For example, is the author actually able to open the textfile? What sort of data does that textfile contain? Are they having trouble working with the array, or trouble opening the textfile? What language are they working with? The answers to each of those can drastically change the way an Expert would approach that question.

Before posting your question try stepping back and putting yourself in the viewpoint of the person trying to assist you. Have you given the Experts enough information? Is the information you've given relevant to that question?

For example, if you're asking a question about hard drive issues the Experts would certainly need to know the make and model of your hard drive, but would they also need to know what the version of Office you have? Probably not. If you're asking a question about Access, then the Experts probably need to know the version of Access you're running, but probably don't need to know the refresh rate of your video card.

In many cases it's difficult to know what is relevant, but a little common sense goes a long way. And don't forget - the easier it is for your Experts to narrow down the problem, the quicker you'll find your solution.

Using Regular Expressions in Visual Basic

matthewspatrick is one of Microsoft's MVPs, and is making his move on the list of "Most Genius Certificates", where he ranks fourth overall with six. This article, entitled "Using Regular Expressions in Visual Basic for Applications and Visual Basic 6", has been an immediate hit, with code, charts and even a working sample in Excel. 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.

Regular Expressions (RegExp) is a class that offers incredibly powerful text parsing capabilities, in particular allowing users to find (and even replace) substrings within larger text entries that fit a particular pattern. This article provides basic information on the VBScript implementation of RegExp, and how you can use it to gain robust text parsing capabilities in Visual Basic 6 (VB6) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) projects. With a little knowledge of the rules and some imagination, you can build incredibly flexible and/or complex patterns.

While this article may be most useful to users with intermediate or advanced programming skills, users of all skill levels (beginners included) can benefit from using RegExp by implementing the "wrapper" functions included in this article. (This article includes a sample Excel workbook that provides examples for each function.) By adding these functions to your VB6/VBA projects, you can quickly and easily incorporate RegExp functionality into your applications. If you are a Microsoft Office user, you can even use these functions in worksheet formulas for Microsoft Excel or in queries in Microsoft Access.

Read the full article.

The future ain't what it used to be

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

Back in the mid-1970s, John Brunner wrote a nice little tale called The Shockwave Rider -- the title having been inspired by Alvin Toffler's Future Shock -- that takes place in a world where almost everyone is connected electronically with everyone else, and in which the greatest evil is the paranoia induced by the not-knowing-but-knowing that everything one does is being watched by a government.

One of the central themes to both Mr Brunner's book and Mr Toffler's is the notion that the future arrives so quickly that most people can't cope; they suffer a kind of information overload. A good number of people proudly say that they survive by multi-tasking; by some genetic quirk, they're able to do several things (with the implication being they do them well) at the same time. Researchers at Stanford University say they're probably wrong, but everyone has the right, as Paul Sweeney suggests, to pull in his stomach when he steps on the scales.

What made is think of Mr Brunner's story is a headline in New Scientist that reads Worldwide battle rages for control of the internet. The article itself barely has anything of note; the only part we didn't know was that the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- defenders of people's perceived right to do pretty much whatever they want, but to not necessarily be responsible for it -- has some software designed to hide the source of web traffic from the "bad guys", which in their case are the governments trying to stifle news about governments that stifle news.

Unfortunately, that sounds an awful lot like the same kind of technology that lets someone send us about fifty emails a day advertising the same well-known enhancement pills. So far, the record (in our spam filter) is eleven consecutive messages that differ only in the percentage discount offered in the subject line.

Another item that got our attention was a story in the New York Times about the data-mining systems people are trying to develop using "sentiment analysis". Brunner thought that the assembled governments of the world would try to gauge sentiment (and control it) by offering betting. Lower the odds of something happening, and it would cause people to not want to see it happen, because the payoff is so low. Just ask the guys in the sports books in Las Vegas how they stay in business. It isn't the outcome of the game they care about; if there is too much money saying the Yankees are going to win, adjust the odds to make it attractive for people to bet on the Red Sox.

We can see marketing people worldwide salivating like Pavlovian hounds at the idea of looking through tons of data in order to find the "next big thing" in whatever market. Slap a pretty label on it, come up with a good commercial, and rake in the bucks, right? Where did we put that label design for ilma dieta... and whatever happened to eNormicom.com?

Finally, there was another Times article that brought up the Conficker worm and its ubiquitousness; in his book, Brunner noted the use of worms for all kinds of things, including those that could feed credit reporting agencies false information, and others that enabled one to change one's identity. At one point, the protagonist says "there were so many worms and counterworms loose in the data-net now, the machines had been instructed to give them a low priority unless they related to a medical emergency." It's a funny thing about computers: everyone believes them all the time, but what happens when they're not telling you the truth?

We have always figured that as long as it's not in the backbone providers' interests to do something about the garbage we all see -- the spam emails, the embedded files that do harm, and the sheer worthlessness of a lot of the bytes stored on who knows how many servers -- then it will continue to proliferate, and the reports of the Internet's immenent death will continue to be an exaggeration. But we will also be adding wasted bytes to death and taxes as inevitabilities as well.

More News and Notes

The chance to do the right thing: Our good buddy Mark sent us the links, and we haven't had that good a laugh at the expense of a big company in years. We had this great plan to link both pages. Then the Christian Science Monitor catches wind of Microsoft's gaffe with a Polish version of a web page, and then Microsoft changes the page. It's a horrid Photoshop job -- but we suspect Adobe's product has joined Xerox, Kleenex and Google as words that started out being companies and products and now mean the generic version of photocopying, tissue and searching on the Internet. For one thing, we first thought that the white guy was the original.

Memo to our Dutch members: UPC is planning to start throttling non-HTTP traffic, and will shut off HTTP traffic from websites that deliver too much of it. In a related story, the Federal Communications Commission has sent notices to the US wireless companies that it is going to conduct "inquiries" into competition and pricing policies. That sound you heard was sphincter muscles tightening.

Department of Ooops: Remember all those air conditioners and refrigerator gasses that were ruining the ozone layer up until the mid-80s? Turns out that by getting rid of them, the level of nitrous oxide -- laughing gas -- has become the new biggest threat to the ozone layer. The chief suspects: farming and sewage treatment. Okay...

"Hitting a golf ball off it" didn't make the top 10: c|net, having discovered the hazards of the slow news day, listed the top 10 ways to break a laptop. Fortunately, as the joke goes, computers don't complain when you hit them. Speaking of Top Ten lists, we're wondering who your top ten list of evil tech companies would include. Some are obvious -- Microsoft, Apple, Google, AT&T -- but others maybe not. Other lists: ten apps for the iPhone rejected by Apple and Symantec's dirtiest sites.

I'm going to pay dearly for this, but I can't resist: There are no words to describe our site of the week. None. No words for this one either (thanks, Jason!). Or this either, which shows that Jason has too much time on his hands.

Just like on CSI: A robbery victim and police tracked down the suspects using the GPS system on a stolen iPhone. It's good that it does that, because there are a lot of people who say it isn't worth much as a phone.

That will teach you to search for your own name on Google: Back in January, model Liskula Cohen (who is no stranger to NY Post readers) got pretty upset when an anonymous blogger called her names, so she did what any red-blooded former Vogue model would do: she sued. Except that she sued Google, owner of Blogger.com, and last week, a judge in New York told the company to release the name of the writer who called Cohen a "skank". Now, the blogger, Rosemary Port (!) is suing Google for "failing to protect her privacy." We're surprised she didn't sue the judge too.

Also on the subject of being careful what you post on the web, a Missouri woman is in trouble for posting fake CraigsList ads after getting into a spat with a teenaged girl and the girl's mother. There's also a case involving a company accused of software piracy that wants to know who outted it, and a woman who used MySpace to try to keep the boyfriend who beat her up out of jail. We can't make this stuff up.

Did you know that if you search for Jessica Biel pictures, you have a 20 percent chance of catching a virus? That makes her the "most dangerous woman on the web." Old favorite Britney comes in at number 12.

Then there's always the movie industry, which has apparently taken to uploading videos to file-sharing sites just to see who downloads them and then sends those people threatening letters. The British are more direct.

There isn't much you can't get on eBay including the vault above Marilyn Monroe's.

By the numbers: A few weeks ago, Kent sent us a note about celebrating during lunch in July, when your digital watch would say 12:34.56 07/08/09 -- unless, of course, you're NOT in the US, when you had to wait until August for that to occur. Anita sent us a little note as a follow up by noting that something happened 48 years ago that won't happen again until 6009, when the year reads the same upside down as it does right side up -- just like it did in 1961. We don't know why we're mentioning that in a tech newsletter -- maybe just to see what kind of mail we'll get.

Another number: 1,400 -- the minimum number of characters that can be posted in a Woofer post.

Words, words, words: We snuck in a little mention last issue about the verdict against Microsoft that said it has to stop selling Word; as expected, rather than write a check for $290 million, Microsoft appealed, and a hearing is set for three weeks from now. Dell and HP have filed briefs asking for a delay in enforcing the ruling.

They didn't come with an ANY key: Governors in four states turned down free HP laptops sent to their offices, courtesy of someone using a phony credit card.

This SHOULD be a Sign of the Apocalypse: Of all the things we've written about (and poked fun at) over the years, none kept us going so well as the trials and tribulations of SCO. Part of that was personal; back in its early days, we were good friends with a number of their employees (one had a cardiac event caused by the stress of all the lawsuits, but that's another story). The other part was strictly based on our admiration for the tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds shown by SCO's management, long after almost anyone else would have crawled into a hole somewhere.

Well, guess what, tech fans. It ain't over. SCO finally didn't lose one; last week, an appeals court overturned a summary judgment that everyone thought -- including yours truly -- was the last nail in the SCOffin. SCO called the ruling "validation"; everyone else pointed out that it just means that Novell will have win a jury trial. We wonder though: who is paying SCO's lawyers?

Sign of the Apocalypse: File-sharing has been banned in Antarctica. Oh, the humanity! Also, those of you older than about forty know what word "dude" has replaced, and Kevin Mitnick may sue AT&T because his cell phone account was breached.

Nata's Corner

There is a great need for sarcasm font. Not that I'd ever use it, of course.

I'm not quite the Facebook addict, but I can see how someone can become that way. It's beyond me why my sister's children don't just write me an email, but for some reason, now that they have found my page, they have posted to me more in the last couple of months than they have written to me in the last six or seven years. But I came across a story about how the Northern California ACLU has observed that even though there are lots of neat quizzes you can build for Facebook, they can also be built to scrape your personal data -- and the data of the people you have as friends. To prove their point, they even built their own quiz. Still, like Twitter was during the elections in the Middle East, sometimes social networking has its feelgood moments.

I'm not a programmer -- I don't even want to think about it -- but I do worry a lot about viruses, and the one that Sophos recently announced has me worried, because it has to do with code that is being inserted into Delphi programs, which are used by a lot of banks. Delphi is mainly used to write programs very quickly, but it's not the programmers' fault if their work gets infected. This virus attacks any program written in Delphi, and then compiles itself into an executable file, which then infects the computer. The worst part is that some software companies that have been using Delphi could have been passing it along without knowing it, but there is one bright spot: it's also possible that the people who are using Delphi to write malware could be infected as well. Wouldn't that be funny...

And tying it all together, after Facebook removed some applications that phish for personal data, the bad guys came back with more apps. By the way, you're reading it here first; I'll bet that it's no more than a few weeks before there is a story about how some creeps are targeting widows on Facebook. They've already figured out a new scam that preys on one of the worst feelings: being robbed in a foreign country.

It's kind of nice to know that it isn't just normal people like me who can become victims of identity theft. About a month ago, the wife of the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board -- he's the guy who oversees the money supply in the U.S. -- had her purse stolen. Now, arrest warrants have been issued for a guy who deposited a check from her stolen checkbook and nine others; they are all accused of running an identity theft ring. In another case, three people were indicted in the Heartland Payment Systems case, accused of stealing data on at least 130 million debit and credit accounts. One of those is going to plead guilty; costs related to the thefts are now in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

New Certificates