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September 3, 2008 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Design, Zone Advisors, a Savant and Geniuses, MVPs

Core Conference 2008
The Experts give us a piece of their minds

Corporate Accounts: The First Year
Proof of concept and then some!

Every Step You Take, Every Move You Make
When is it really too much information?

More News and Notes
Didn't they learn anything from the Edsel?

Nata's Corner
It's time to go back to school

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through August 30

Tips From The Moderators
Posting code and working with Experts

What's New at Experts Exchange

New Design: Yes, we thought you might have noticed. Major props go to eestephany, one of several interns who have spent the summer at Experts Exchange and contributed immensely to the success of Core Conference 2008, for her diligent work in working all the kinks out of this new format, and to bobexpert for letting her run with it.

Why change? Two reasons. First, the old layout, while familiar, was based on a site now 19 months in the past. Second, the new layout is completely compliant with Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007, GMail and most other email clients -- something that has bothered us for a long time. Feel free to send us your critiques.

New Zone Advisors: Two Experts have joined the Zone Advisor list: Kdo, who generally patrols the C, C++, DB2 and Unix zones; and zephyr_hex, who will help out in the Sharepoint-MOSS zone, along with some of the Windows OS zones. Welcome aboard!

New Savant and Geniuses: capricorn1 has become Experts Exchange's third Savant, having earned 10,000,000 points in the Access zone. He also has two other Genius certificates.

Those earning their Genius certificates are hdhondt, who is the first in Printers & Scanners; ciuly, the third member with 1,000,000 points in Delphi Programming; TimCottee, who celebrated his tenth anniversary as a member by picking up his Genius certificate in Visual Basic; Zeffer, the third to reach 1,000,000 points in Macromedia Flash; mass2612, the ninth Genius in Microsoft Exchange Server; and jaime_olivares, the third in C# Programming. Congratulations, and nice work, to all.

Another MVP: SysExpert received his second consecutive Microsoft MVP award, this year in Enterprise Security. We also heard from VBRocks, whose award we mentioned last issue: "I saw that you added a note about me being nominated as an MS Visual Basic MVP! Thank you very much! Just like scott mentioned, I received the award (primarily) for my work on EE as well. I had no clue my support of the programming community had that kind of visibility at EE. But I'm very grateful. Thank you again!"

To all of the Microsoft MVPs who wander the byways of Experts Exchange, we are grateful for your continued contributions, and are proud to call all of you our colleagues. Thank you for all your incredible work!

Kudos:: Simon336697 posted high praise for this year's leader in the Top Expert race, hielo: "He is just amazing, not only with his incredible wealth of knowledge, but the speed with which he responds to your problems, and the patience and generosity he shows at helping others and myself big time."

It took RQuadling a month, including some time spent at the Core Conference, to finally get ablsysadmin squared away on a PHP question, but it turned out to be worth it: "I have never had sure excellent help in my life. The Expert could have given up, but he was very helpful and understanding. He even gave me advice which is good. RQuadling, thank you very much for all your effort and help with this and for the advice (repeating myself now). I wish you all the best and keep up the good work."

eegrep, a fairly new Expert, hit a home run on one of her first answers, helping bataviacomputer, who was asking his first question: "eegrep, you are my idol... Thanks for making my first attempt at a question on EE a huge success!" What are even better are the words eegrep had in return: "You are the perfect question poster and thank you for making my experience here a great one also."

Milestones:

• war1 has earned 16,000,000 points overall.
• mlmcc has earned 8,000,000 points overall, and 7,000,000 points in the Crystal Reports zone.
• Zvonko reached the 7,000,000 point milestone.
• Achieving 6,000,000 points overall are hielo, rindi, and acperkins.
• garycase has earned 5,000,000 points overall.

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 August 30.

Core Conference 2008

We mentioned it last issue; about 40 or so Experts Exchange members gathered in San Luis Obispo for the first Core Conference with the Experts Exchange management and staff August 15-17. By all accounts, the conference was a home run; had anyone known how many pads of paper the EE staff used in taking notes, stock market analysts would have been issuing "Buy" orders for Crown Zellerbach stock.

There was only one real agenda: Experts Exchange wanted to meet its members (at least, a portion of them), and wanted to give members a chance to sit down and kick around anything that was on their minds. The staff did a pre-conference survey of the attendees, and then took the time to build the schedule around the results of the survey.

The conference kicked off with a talk from CEO Randy Redberg, who made himself available to the members for virtually the entire time the participants were attending. Redberg's comments set the tone for the entire conference; his enthusiasm for meeting the members and listening to their concerns was the first step in what became a virtual partnership between the company and the people who use the site.

Considerable time was spent on question and answer sessions with several members of the staff, including Brian Gardner, EE's long-time head of Engineering; Marketing Director Jonathan Hoekman; Creative Director Mark Barbir; Chris Hiatt, the head of Customer Service; and Andrew Alsup, the company's Site Director of Operations.

The two highlights, though, were the round-table sessions, co-chaired by an Experts Exchange employee and a member of the site, and what was titled the "free-for-all" -- a session during which the attendees could fire off any question at both the Experts Exchange senior staff and the site's online personnel.

There are too many ideas that came out of the conference to list; when you put 40+ of Experts Exchange's most talented and imaginative Experts in one place, and give them half a dozen easels with Marks-A-Lot-armed interns, you're going to come up with more ideas than anyone can process in time to include them all here.

At the top of everyone's list were issues having to do with closing questions and grading. Second, far and away, was easier systems for teaching new members how the site works, including everything from video tutorials to a mentoring program. Experts were also on the list; any number of ideas geared toward supporting that segment of the membership without whom the site wouldn't exist. Among them are articles, blogs, an API to support user-created applications, and a customizable skin.

Other issues that received a lot of focus were abandoned questions, homework, notifications and even an EE store.

Special mention must be made of Jenna Walravin, whose tireless attention to the members' needs in preparing for the conference made it a huge success as well.

For visuals, please see angelIII's photos, the "official" photos by Peter Uzzi, stone5150's photos and links to LucF's photos.

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Corporate Accounts: The First Year

On July 30th, 2008 Tribune Media Services was the first client to renew their Corporate Account for another year, marking the first anniversary of Experts Exchange Corporate Accounts. Corporate Accounts were introduced during the summer of 2007 in response to the community asking for plans which would accommodate multiple users within an organization. Since then, Corporate Accounts has attracted more than 600 clients including Fortune 500 companies such as Walt Disney, American Express, IBM, and Lockheed Martin.

The success of Corporate Accounts has confirmed that the community was spot on in their requests for plans for multiple users. Send us your suggestions on how we can improve Corporate Accounts in order to save your organization more time and money.

>>Learn More About Corporate Accounts

Tips From the Moderators

Posting code and working with Experts

This issue's tip comes from AnnieMod.

When you ask a question in the Programming zones, you may need to post part of your code so the Experts can understand what you are asking about. Here is a few basic guidelines that will help you communicate your problem more clearly.

1. Post only relevant code. There is no need to post your complete application when you are asking how to fix a small part of it.
2. Clean your code before posting it. Almost everyone keeps commented lines in their code while they develop it. But when help is required, these dead lines make the code longer and harder to be read.
3. Build a small case if possible. Instead of posting your full code, it may be better to strip it to the basics so the Experts have an executable code to try if they want.
4. "Fix my code" is not a question. The only person who knows what happens in the code is you. Instead of posting your full code and asking it to be fixed, try to see which parts fail and post only them.
5. Use the code snippet area. Posting your code is what it is there for. Do not post your code in the question body and unless you really need to post a full file, do not upload code as a file.
6. Java, Javascript and Jscript are three different technologies. When a question is posted in the Javascript area asking for java script, no one will even guess that you need a Java solution. Make sure you understand which zones you need or if you are not sure post it in the more generic areas and explain what you need.
7. Always post what you have already tried. This will tell the Experts that you have tried to solve your problem, and will show them where you are stuck. It gives the Experts a starting point and some understanding of your level of expertise.
8. Communicate properly your knowledge level. Advanced users and beginners need different kinds of help. Most Experts understand this but it helps if you are up front about it.

The worst 3 comments the experts want to see from askers when the question requires some code modification/writing:

1. "This code does not work": Most experts cannot guess what you mean. You need to specify how it does not work: Does it throw an exception? Does it fail functionally and how?
    
   
2. "The code threw an exception": The experts will need to use the stars to guess what is the problem. The full stack trace of the error/exception and any information how it happened needs to be posted. Otherwise no one can really help.
    
   
3. "Oh, didn't I mention I need it in C#/Java5/C++/whatever": Specify all languages and versions that can help get you your solution. Use the zones and use the tags. But if ten Experts give you .NET solutions because you didn't mention the language you write in, it is not exactly nice to come back and say that you will accept only a PHP solution.

Corporate Accounts: The First Year

On July 30th, 2008 Tribune Media Services was the first client to renew their Corporate Account for another year, marking the first anniversary of Experts Exchange Corporate Accounts. Corporate Accounts were introduced during the summer of 2007 in response to the community asking for plans which would accommodate multiple users within an organization. Since then, Corporate Accounts has attracted more than 600 clients including Fortune 500 companies such as Walt Disney, American Express, IBM, and Lockheed Martin.

The success of Corporate Accounts has confirmed that the community was spot on in their requests for plans for multiple users. Send us your suggestions on how we can improve Corporate Accounts in order to save your organization more time and money.

Learn More About Corporate Accounts

Take a gander at 20 of our newest corporate clients:

Enerfab Inc.
Farnsworth Group, Inc.
Altus Group Limited
Ivory Investment Management, LP
Tiber Creek Consulting
City of Georgetown
Authentic Education
AIIM
University of Adelaide
Four Hands

Maryland Department of Natural Resources
Winwerk GmbH
E-butik I Norden
TG
Goodrich Corporation
Linium
Blum Shapiro
Choctaw Nation Health Services Authority
Altra Industrial Motion, Inc.
USAISR

Learn More About Corporate Accounts

Every Step You Take, Every Move You Make

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

Dante Ramos of the Boston Globe had a curiously provocative column a week or so ago about changing email addresses.

I understand his discomfort at the prospect of changing addresses. I have one email address that I've had since the mid-90s, and since no one has offered me the five or six figures it would take to convince me to give it up (that was my business plan when I purchased the domain), it would be a hassle to change it. The domain is recognizable, it's not from some huge, faceless company, and damn it, it's me. There's also a certain jingoistic pleasure derived from being able to tell people that California isn't all about freeways, smog, the beach and movie stars.

Still, virtually all of you, when you read the editorial, will snicker about the service from which Mr. Ramos changed, high-end, holier-than-thou power users of email that we all are. I did, so don't feel bad. We should refrain from inwardly smirking at that service's 27 million or so subscribers (the number keeps dwindling), many of whom are not among the fifty per cent of the US who are using a broadband ISP. Do the math; when someone says that half the US is on broadband, it also means that half the US is not on broadband -- but that's another story.

But one thing about Mr. Ramos' commentary was a little unnerving. I use Gmail as well (actually, I only use it for anything related to Experts Exchange, so there is very little that comes to my Gmail account that isn't EE-related), but since I rarely use the web interface, I don't often see the "quirky" advertising Google chooses to post on the page while I'm deleting notifications and such.

I have to admit that like Mr. Ramos, I find some of the advertising entertaining, especially when the Google algorithm tries to match something to the Experts Exchange notifications. They probably aren't as funny as the ones he notes (a question notification asking for a banner warning about certain kinds of questions resulted in ads for "Full Color Vinyl Banners", for example), but I'm generally easily amused anyway.

But all the frivolity got me thinking: There's an old saw about US taxpayers being lucky that we aren't getting the government we pay for -- a comment on the apparently inverse relationship between the cost of government and its efficiency. So... what would life be like if Google's advertising were really accurately delivered based on what we get in our email?

I'm a reasonably public person; it goes with the territory when you spend half your life dealing with public officials, school boards, Rotary clubs and wandering the sidelines with a camera and voice recorder at high school sporting events. Except when I worked for a reasonably good-sized VAR, my email is mine; it's not anyone else's business unless I choose to make it their business.

So I wonder. What do Google's machines know about me? If they're reading my email, are they also paying attention to anything else I do? Like what I search for? And while I'd like to believe them, given Google's less than line-in-the-sand stance taken with China, how much can I believe that the company won't cave in to pressure from the same people who say they can confiscate your laptop at an airport gate? After all, they know where everyone lives.

Don't get me wrong; I'm sure Google has the best people it can find keeping those nasty hacker types away from what might otherwise be termed confidential data. What I worry about is what will happen when people flashing badges and stacks of paper come knocking. Let's face it: the last decade has not been kind to the Fourth Amendment.

I will allow that Google has to pay its bills, and it does so by selling advertising; indeed, it is probably the only business based solely on the web that makes a profit by selling ads, and it does so by also controlling the distribution network. Back in the good ol' days, you reached the national baseball fan by advertising on NBC because you had no other choice; today, if you want to do online context-based advertising, you talk to Google.

It's not getting any better, either. The news last week was that Google is tinkering with its ad quality ranking systems. That's good for advertisers, but I'm not so sure it's good for me. It means Google is paying a lot more attention to the content in my mail, and I'm not so sure I like that much -- even if I never click on an ad. What gives Google the right... oh, yeah. I clicked the Agree button.

More News and Notes

Didn't they learn anything from the Edsel? The last few months, we've posted a lot of links to a lot of stories about a particular company that can't seem to figure out which way it's going -- but everyone else seems to think its direction is southbound. About a year ago, said company decided -- a couple of years too late -- that it was going to get into the "social networking" business, so it took a little of Facebook, a little of Wikipedia, and a little from everyone else who had already figured it out, and put it all together into an appropriately named sub-site called "Mash". Last week, loyal users got an email saying that Mash is shutting down at the end of the month.

For those of you who get a vicarious thrill out of such things, August 26's closing price of $19.07 a share was Yahoo's lowest since January 20, 2008; before that, you have to go back to October 2003 to find a cheaper share price. Besides self-centered leadership that is being abandoned by upper managers at an alarming rate, is there some reason for this gradual decline in value? Well, as of last week, MySpace was serving up more display ad views, dropping Yahoo to second place in the US market. The deal between Google and Yahoo -- in which Google will supply some of the paid advertising to Yahoo, assuming the feds don't get antsy -- is moving forward, which means that while Yahoo is getting help paying its bills, it does so by entering into an agreement with its largest competitor. Oh... and Yahoo could be sending some of its people from the relative glamour of the Bay Area to suburban Omaha, not that there's anything wrong with Omaha.

Please keep the jokes we know you're going to send to us clean: The website of the State of California's Commission on Judicial Performance was hacked and then taken down over the weekend.

The Next Big Thing, and it isn't on beta at GoogleLabs: A stupid comment purger available as a Firefox plug-in. It didn't make TechRepublic's 10 most useful Firefox extensions (alternate link here but you have to register to see it), but it should. And yes, Kevin, we'll stop using those three little characters you love to hate so much.

Now you know the reason I check the obituaries every morning: Or, to paraphrase Mark Twain, "The report of Steve Jobs' death is an exaggeration." Not that things like this never happen elsewhere.

Proof that someone in Washington has half a brain: The Federal Trade Commission has finally put some limits on those uber-annoying robocalls. Now if they would just apply them to the politicians who use them.

Proof that a couple of people could use one: The Brothers Agarwalla, who evidently feel that laws against copying someone else's work and launching it on Facebook do not apply to them, are unhappy with Facebook for taking down their version of Scrabble. Memo to Jayant: Here's something from another board game manufacturer, since it seems you don't have one.

I won't worry any longer about all those open Experts Exchange windows: Comcast has published the conditions under which its customers can expect to have their bandwidth choked back. That's fine with me; the odds that I'm ever going to hit the 250gb per month level are pretty slim, although there are times when it feels like I'm using that much. But what bothers me is the line that says that 250gb is the equivalent of 50 million emails. Now... if Comcast can figure out how to slow down those people who download (and upload) 62,500 songs, why can't they figure out a way to stop the people who are sending me thousands of spam emails every day? Then there would be plenty of bandwidth for everyone. Jus' sayin'...

The Evil Empire Strikes Back: A couple of weeks after Firefox 3 is released, the beta version Internet Explorer 8 has found its way to computers everywhere. The initial reviews -- even from such notoriously picky people as our good friend CPColin -- are actually far more positive than anything we've heard about a Microsoft product in a long time.

That was followed up Monday by an "ooops" -- yeah, right -- from Google in which they announced their own browser, dubbed Chrome. It was supposed to be available Tuesday after our deadline. Now we'll see a real browser war.

Why hackers don't have to work too hard to acquire confidential information from banks and credit card companies: Because they know that sooner or later, they'll be able to buy it on eBay... [pause] ... from an IT manager... [pause] ... In related news, there have already been more reported data breaches this year than in all of 2007.

"When I was 25 (actually, 28, but who's counting), it was a very good year...": That was the year we got our hands on our first ever PC clone, with a copy of MS-DOS and just enough knowledge to be dangerous (anyone out there remember  c:/>g=c800:5 ?). We even had a neat little program that tested for "IBM compatability". So we've always been curious as to how Apple managed to keep its stranglehold on its share of the market; one suspects that myriad well-paid attorneys on retainer might have had something to do with it. So it was with tremendous interest that we noted Psystar's arrival as a manufacturer of Apple clones, which was predictably -- though not quickly -- followed by Apple's filing of a lawsuit. This one isn't going to go away, though: Psystar, doing what every good American company does when it's sued, has countersued claiming anti-trust violations.

Sign of the Apocalypse: The laptops on the International Space Station are infected with a worm (wait until Dick Cheney finds out). There's a great Andromeda Strain-type movie in there, just crying for someone to write it. The really scary part? This might not be the first time.

Nata's Corner

It's back to school time around here, so I think it's a good time to remind parents to have that little chat -- no, not that little chat -- the other one, about what they need to think about as they head out with all that new stuff they have.

First, remind them about all the dangers that are posed when they post TMI -- too much information -- about themselves on sites like Facebook and MySpace. I'm not going to repost all the horror stories, because we've all read them; I'm just going to remind you that you should pay attention to what your children are doing with that new laptop or phone you got for them. It's not just what they're posting you have to watch out for; it's what they're clicking on as well.

Second, speaking of that new laptop, make sure it has a good antivirus program, and it wouldn't hurt to make sure it has a firewall installed as well. Then make sure they keep it updated. Computers are great -- they make my life a lot easier, and I have fun with it as well -- but the last thing you need is for your child to be carrying around a zombie because s/he downloaded some nifty tool bar or liked that collection of smiley faces. So make sure that part of the deal of getting a new computer is that you get to check it every once in a while. And don't think that your child's new iPhone is perfectly safe either.

Third, set a few limits on the phone and the computer. You should be reasonable; it's not cool to tell someone s/he can only be on their MySpace page for half an hour if you're spending four hours a night answering questions at Experts Exchange. But they do have homework and such, so make sure it gets done before they start playing.

There's a new email making the rounds about a free update for Vista and Windows XP. Needless to say, the link is to someplace other than Microsoft, and it's pretty blatant: it downloads a file named install.exe. We're so used to seeing phony file names, and getting warned about Flash files and such that it is perfectly reasonable to spam the world with a link like this -- because there are people out there who will click on it.

Finally, I just wanted to let everyone know that Experts Exchange put on a great show for those of us lucky enough to be able to attend their conference last week. I've had a great time writing this every couple of weeks, and the people at EE were so appreciative that it's hard to express how much I enjoyed talking with everyone.

New Certificates