Having trouble viewing this newsletter? View our web version to see it in your browser.

September 30, 2009 >>

What's New at Experts Exchange
Features, Geniuses, Mail and Kudos

Encrypt your Thumb Drive at Work and Use it at Home
DanRollins on protecting your work away from the office

Fonts, Web Design, and the Holy Grail
lherrou on making your website look they way you want

C++ Q & A / Interview Practice Questions
evilrix on getting ready for that pop quiz

How to Succeed in ... Anything
Managing to cope, and coping with managing

More News and Notes
If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?

Nata's Corner
Teaching your kids online safety

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through September 26

What's New at Experts Exchange

New Geniuses: zephyr_hex, one of the Zone Advisors for Microsoft Sharepoint, has earned her Genius certificate in the zone. Joining her as the newest Genius in SQL Server 2005 is rrjegan17. Congratulations to both!

Milestones:

• leew has earned 11,000,000 points in his Experts Exchange career, and has certificates in fifty different zones. In case you're curious, SysExpert has 48. Translated into T-shirts, leew has a five-shirt lead over SysExpert (97-92), but both trail angelIII, who has earned 114 shirts and 46 certificates.
• Chris-Dent has reached the 6,000,000 point level.

Meeting of the minds: merry_mod (the taller of the two) recently had occasion to travel across the US, where she arranged to meet up with one of her new colleagues, LadyModiva. Both have declined to share the substance of their conversations, which has the Admins a little nervous.

Book published: Helen_Feddema, who was a beta tester for Access 1.0 and was one of the earliest evangelists for the software, recently published an e-book titled Access Archon: Working With Word. This is her 14th book.

From the EE Skunkworks: patrickab and webtubbs put their heads together and have come up with some interesting ways of looking at Experts Exchange's top Experts.

Kudos: JORzech might have gotten a bit more than she bargained for when she answered a question from LennyGray about some ill-formatted labels, but the payoff was worth it: "Thanks for your help! This is exactly what I needed. The document was provided by a town employee who barely can perform word processing but has a heart of gold. You have played a major role helping me and my pro bono committee in raising funds to save three 50+ year-old sisters from losing their home. 1,500 points could never come close to the impact of your assistance!"

demazter came to the rescue when will4062 was having trouble finding free space on an Exchange server: "I don't know when he sleeps...honestly. The responses to my posts were fast and on-point. He offered a lot of suggestions to try for a troublesome problem."

dabdowb was having issues seeing details on SQL filegroups, and after the question stalled, jimpen spent a couple of days on the problem and finally came up with a solution: "jimpen, this is pure genius!! That is exactly what I was hoping to get in the results from this query. AWESOME!! Thanks you so much for your time and effort, and it is great to hear that you believe you have use for this type of data as well. Absolute bonus. Have a great day and thanks again!!"

The In-box: Auric1983, whose email address implies a familiarity with airborne delivery systems, had an interesting take on our item last week about a carrier pigeon being faster than broadband: "IP over Avian Carriers is only a half duplex protocol, but the TTL is amazing, given enough time the packets will regenerate themselves."

Fun and games: Best line of the long, hot summer, sent to us by mrjoltcola, who found it in a question about compiling a C project in Linux: "Writing programs in the lab sucks because there is no food or drink and I have to wear pants."

Work smarter. Work faster. Work better.

Put the world's best technology Experts to work for you today.

For individuals, upgrade to Premium Services.

• Receive professional help for your IT problems
• Save time to use on other projects or tasks
• Improve your IT knowledge through interaction

For organizations, create a Corporate Account. In addition to Premium Service features, Corporate Accounts also...

• Make it easy for your organization to pay for your access
• Save you 42% or more off the standard monthly rate
• Enable your account administrator to manages licenses
• Allow you to pay by purchase order

Upgrade to Premium Services.
Learn More about Corporate Accounts

To make sure you get the next issue of our newsletter, please add the email address newsletter@experts-exchange.com to your address book for a better viewing experience.

Tips From the Moderators

A couple of weeks ago, Experts Exchange released a new system that prevents someone who has abandoned his question from asking more questions. Here's how it works:

After you get responses to your question, you are expected to respond to the people trying to help you. If you don't, then three days later, you will start getting emails from Experts Exchange reminding you to participate and respond, to close your question, or to request the attention of the Moderators.

If your question goes two weeks without you taking one of those three steps, your ability to ask more questions is limited to only the Community Support zones.

Since the system was released a couple of weeks ago, we also want to pass along a couple of tips. First, complaining isn't likely to help your cause very much. Experts Exchange's systems work because the people who ask questions reward the people who answer them, so by not doing that, the person you are hurting the most is yourself. Second, closing or deleting your question just to get it off your Abandoned Questions list will cause the Experts to object -- and the question will eventually wind up back on the list.

So participate in your questions. Respond to the Experts, close your questions promptly, and grade the answers fairly. Your experience at Experts Exchange will be much the richer for doing so.

Encrypt your Thumb Drive at Work and Use it at Home

DanRollins has established himself as Expert Exchange's most prolific author, with over thirty works to his credit. This is the first of a two-part series that is outstanding advice for the user who works at home and at an office. 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.

USB "Thumb Drives" are convenient and cheap. They are great for making quick backups and for transferring data from one place to another. But if you lose a portable flash disk, anything it contains is easily read by whoever finds it. It turns out to be pretty easy to use Windows EFS (Encrypting File System) to encrypt thumb drive data, but it's not so obvious how to make it possible to read from that drive on another computer.

This two-part article describes the steps needed to use EFS to store encrypted data on a thumb drive at work and still be able to use that data on another computer at home. I can dump an entire project directory onto the drive on Friday and use it at home with no fear that if I were to lose the drive, say, at an airport, my client's proprietary source code would be at risk.

Read the full article, and then read the second part.

Fonts, Web Design, and the Holy Grail

You can make the case that lherrou is one of the reasons your humble editor does the newsletter, since we discovered long ago that we could not compete with his massive knowledge of fonts. This article describes a situation that has driven many a web designer to drink.

At some time or another, most web designers struggle over the issue of how to display a specific font on a website. In general, for website text to display in a specific font face in a client browser, the client computer MUST have that font installed. Site visitors who do not have it installed will not be able to see the text in that face. Yet, good design (and paying clients) often require that a specific font be used.

There's no easy solution to this issue. However, there are a number of approaches that can be taken to accomplish the goal. Each of these possible solutions come with trade-offs.

Read the entire article.

C++ Q & A / Interview Practice Questions

It's no secret that the world economy is having it rough, and many a programmer might be faced with the questions evilrix lines out. While the subject matter is a specific programming language, it is a good read for anyone who hasn't faced an HR department for a while.

How good is your C++? Below is a collection of questions that I have built up over time that test how well someone who claims to know C++ actually does. Knowing the answers to these questions will probably help you avoid making a lot of mistakes made by less experienced C++ programmers that can lead to some rather hard to isolate defects. It's also worth noting that a lot of these questions are typical interview questions, so if you are currently career searching it would pay you well to use this article to bring your skills up to speed.

The format of this article is not typical of most EE articles, in so far as it is not about a specific topic; rather it should be seen as a Q & A (or FAQ). To get the best out of it try and answer each question yourself before looking at the answer. Each answer will give you, along with the actual answer, an explanation of why the answer is what it is and, where appropriate, links to external resources will be provided for further reading.

Read the entire article.

How to Succeed in ... Anything

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

It never ceases to amaze me the lengths to which people will go.

I've been a member of the workforce since I was about 12. I didn't have to dig ditches, and it wasn't because I had to keep, while shoeless, a family of thirteen from starving in some godforsaken part of the world where "running water" meant a stream about a quarter of a mile away. I did have to learn to load and run a printing press, use a linotype, handle a Speed Graphic and write halfway decently, and my bosses were the same people who took me to Little League practice -- but it was still work.

Since then, I've had a few jobs I couldn't stand -- so I did the best thing I could think of: I quit and found some other way to earn a living. A portion of the past 40+ years was spent in a cubicle; I can't call it a "cube farm", because while almost everyone was in a cubicle, nobody was really expected to spend all day sitting in it. Fortunately, most of my working life has not been in a cubicle; I have actually spent more time managing one kind of business or another, and one of the perks has usually been being allowed to prohibit cubicles.

So while I appreciate a good laugh, I was a little disturbed at an article about staying sane in a cubicle. It's not that I would be all that upset if someone occasionally did some of the things on the list. But neither I nor my bosses pay my employees to respond to the Tweets posted by Ashton Kutcher or their great-aunt Susie in Des Moines, or to wander around the room aimlessly, interrupting the people who are trying to get something constructive done.

What bothers me even more, though, is that the author would feel compelled to write such an article in the first place. I don't blame him -- although perhaps his career choices haven't been particularly wise if he has that many bad experiences -- but I do blame the people who have made the idea of going into the office so miserable that he has to devise ways to keep from -- oh, I don't know -- destroying the coffee machine because someone didn't make a fresh pot. I blame the people he's worked for.

I enjoy management; I've run restaurants, newspapers, construction companies, and half a dozen other different operations involving getting other people to do what someone else wanted done in the manner that was most effective. So, by way of response to my esteemed colleagues at that other site, here are ten ways (with a couple of bonus ones) to keep your employees from having to resort to finding ways to keep their sanity at work.

1. Outwork your employees. If you're not being productive, they're not going to be productive. That doesn't mean, if you're managing the local Denny's, that you have to wait on more tables than your waitresses do; it means that you are always doing something to make their work easier. Making up next week's schedule will wait an hour or two; the line at the front door won't. Robert Heinlein once noted that "progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something." If you help your employees do their jobs more easily, they will do them better too.

2. Talk with your customers. Find out from them what you, your employees, and your organization are doing right, and what you could be doing better. They'll keep paying you if they think you actually care about what they need. (It's not a bad idea to talk with your employees too; you'll be surprised what the people who talk to customers all day can tell you about what your customers really think.)

3. Never give an order. People will generally respond to them reasonably quickly -- but the next time a similar situation comes up, they're going to wait for you to give orders again. When someone asks me what to do, I tell them what I would do -- and then tell them to use their best judgment. If I've done my job as a manager, and hired the best people I can find, the best thing I can do is stay out of their way. I'm supposed to "manage;" I'm not supposed to be an impediment.

4. Admit you screwed up. No one has ever been right every time, and the odds are against you being the first. But you look a lot worse to your employees if you try to make excuses than you do if you say "okay, I goofed -- now, how do we fix it?" Even worse than that is saying "we're doing it my way anyway;" that's like bobbling the ground ball and then throwing it over the first baseman's head.

5. Check your ego at the door. The job isn't about you. It isn't about your employees. It's about the people who keep the money flowing through the cash register. You can't force your employees to think about that all the time, but you'll go a long way toward getting people who work for you to think about it if you do.

6. Pay attention. You shouldn't need a scorebook to know who your best people are. You also don't need a scorebook to tell you what their flaws are. If you know what someone's job is (you should -- after all, you're the manager), you don't need to watch his or her every move to tell whether they're doing it or not. Frankly, unless their job requires that they update their Facebook page every day, then either they don't know what their job is (your fault for not telling them) or they do know but don't consider it a priority (your fault for letting them get away with it).

7. Meetings where you're not closing a sale are a waste of time. That doesn't mean they should all be done away with; it does mean that they should be minimized. Results are what matters. If your employees are doing their jobs, then tasks get done on time and under budget. Having a meeting to find out where everyone is takes them away from doing what they're supposed to be doing. Remember -- your employees are looking for you to make decisions, and their job is to provide you with the information you need to make one. You don't need their approval; you just need to make sure you've heard what they have told you.

8. Trust your employees. I wish I had a dime for every time a boss told me he had a great team, but who then spent every waking moment either reading reports from them on what they're doing (or worse, holding meetings to find out) or checking over everything they did. If they're so great, why are you double-checking all their work? If they're not so great, why aren't you teaching them so they're better? Or finding better employees? And how much time have they spent preparing reports on what they've been doing, instead of actually doing it?

9. Respect your employees. You can't say you respect them and then treat them like red-headed stepchildren; for one thing, no one is going to believe you, and if no one believes you, they certainly don't respect you. Nobody gets respect just because they're the boss; they earn it because they respect the people who are supposed to be showing them respect.

10. Communicate. That's usually a code word for telling your employees what you think they need to know -- which is a crock. Communication is a two-way street, which means letting your people have their say, and allowing for the possibility that they might know what they're talking about. So sit back and listen; you don't even have to get in the last word (but saying "thank you" goes a long way).

Bonus 1: Your employees are not your friends. You're their boss. Sooner or later, in every manager's career, there is going to be a time when a decision that is a positive move for the organization is a negative one for a person -- and you're the one who has to make that decision. That doesn't mean you have to be a ruthless cutthroat who can't stand anyone; it does mean that you're not always going to be the most popular kid in school. If you're not up to it, you're in the wrong job.

Bonus 2: Chill. The only time you need to be a "take charge kinda guy (or gal)" is when the situation demands that someone take charge. That's YOUR job. The rest of the time, you can just be yourself. To paraphrase Kipling, take everything you like seriously -- except yourself.

More News and Notes

If you're so rich, why aren't you smart? Just when we think people with a lot of money can't get any more foolish, they go and pour another $20 million or so into the Silicon Valley Sinkhole known as Twitter. We're putting our money into 37signals instead; at least they have a clue. If you've never read their book, do so now, before you do anything else.

News from the shallow end of the gene pool: The CSI and NCIS folks didn't have to do a lot of work to catch the burglar who decided to check his Facebook page from the house from which he was stealing two diamond rings. We can just see him updating his girlfriend's wall, but at least he didn't stop to play with the Wii. Then there's the Boston political aide who deleted all kinds of incriminating emails from his computer. Too bad the emails are also on the computers of people he sent them to. The city is working too hard; they could have just asked AT&T.

Not much neutral ground: Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski gave a speech last week that drew a line in the sand on the matter of "Net Neutrality" -- the idea that the people who own the pipes that make up the Intertubes don't get to control who sends or receives how much data (and potentially, what data) through those pipes. Unhappy with the prospect of new rules telling them they only get to provide the service were Comcast, CTIA (the trade industry association that doesn't really hide any collusive and/or trade-restraining activities), our old friends at AT&T and Verizon. And since Genachowski was appointed by a Democratic president, it should be no surprise that the Repulicans don't like it either.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ... when the price of a Nintendo Wii drops by 20 percent. Expect almost everything else electronic to follow, but don't expect new motion sensor systems from either Sony or Microsoft until next spring at the earliest. On the other hand, Microsoft just might beat Apple to market with its new tablet. It folds like... (sorry, can't resist) Origami.

The rumors are better than the software: Microsoft is not all that far away from starting to sell Windows 7, so people are already trying to turn Vista into the latest version of Windows ME by posting rumors about Windows 8.

Walks Like A Duck department: The Nigerian government is mad at Sony over a PS3 commercial that includes the line, "You can't believe everything you read on the Internet. Otherwise I'd be a Nigerian millionaire by now." Should Nigeria be insulted? And in case you like seeing big companies getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar, the EU has published its response to Intel's displeasure over being cited for antitrust violations.

They could have just asked a question: Netflix has announced the winner of its contest to build a better mousetrap, and announced another contest with a 50 percent increase in the prize money.

Chain Yanking Division sounds good: We want the job at Google in the department that sits around and thinks up ways to irritate other big companies; it sounds like a lot of fun. For instance:

• Google pushes a plug-in for Internet Explorer 6-8 that incorporates its Chrome renderer and JavaScript engine into IE -- making it more W3C-compliant; Microsoft says it makes IE8 unsafe -- which is fine, but there are still all those people who haven't upgraded.
• Google builds a nice little iPhone app for its Google Voice, but Apple rejects it, saying that it duplicates what the iPhone does. Everyone suspects AT&T, with whom Apple has an exclusive arrangement for phone service, for deep-sixing the app, even though Ma Bell denies it. So AT&T complains to the FCC that Google is violating telephone laws, while Clearwire, a company that Google has put some money into, comes out supporting "net neutrality" -- something AT&T absolutely hates.

And on a related subject, Google, which had in hand a signed and sealed deal to store (and presumably resell) almost every book you can possibly imagine, agreed to go back to the drawing board and renegotiate its deal with book publishers. It might have been the fact that both the US Department of Justice and a couple of French publishers were complaining.

Of course they were watching.

Taking a page from the NPT playbook: We're not going to suggest that SpeedTrack, a company that -- to date -- has written software used by law enforcement agencies to aid in managing criminal case records and histories, doesn't have a bit of a gripe. But we do wonder why they waited all these years to sue the likes of Amazon, Dell and Barnes & Noble among others. Oh, and that sound you hear? That's the sound of corporate lawyers planning their 2013 vacation destinations. Speaking of whom, you have to give the guys at ASCAP some credit for nerve. Not to be outdone by the recording industry bloodsuckers, the ASCAP folks have decided that ringtones are "performances", and are therefore subject to license fees. For further details, see the item above about the shallow end of the gene pool.

Jason's Site of the Week: Getting Simpsonized.

Available in a variety of colors: No, not the iPod Nano or the Dell laptop; we're talking about the ankle bracelets that can detect alcohol in your sweat.

If Y!ou can't stand the heat: Yahoo boss Carol Bartz is about as different from founder and former boss Jerry Yang as is humanly possible. He imitates E.E. Cummings; she imitates E. Hemingway. He did everything he could to duck a deal with Microsoft; she says she'd have done it in a heartbeat ("Do you think I'm stupid?"). He flitted from incarnation to incarnation of the company he started, driving its relevance and market share into the abyss; she has made them a credible company again. Until last week, that is, when Flickr, a Yahoo company, censored an account for posting a parody of a Time magazine cover -- and then closed off discussion of the matter in their forums. Flickr has apparently decided that the DMCA complaint about it was fraudulent (riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight) and allowed the image to be re-uploaded. Memo to Ms. Bartz: You may not be stupid, but neither are the people you censor.

Sign of the Apocalypse: There aren't going to be any more problems with any future Windows mobile operating systems (but there are no such assurances regarding the current versions -- thanks, Ed!), and a bank in Wyoming sued Google because a bank employee sent an email to the wrong Gmail account.

Nata's Corner

I've been doing this for quite a while, and I think I've been pretty consistent about reminding people to make sure their antivirus software is up to date, that they don't bite on phishing attempts, and that they keep their personal information secure. So it seems like it's about time that the company that has long been the most obvious target for all the bad people out there to get on the bandwagon, and to its credit, Microsoft has stepped up to the plate.

There are plenty of sites that remind you, in cold, technical terms, why you should be careful in your habits when it comes to technology -- the antivirus companies, the various government sites, and of course, the great Experts at Experts Exchange -- but a lot of that information is given to people when it's already too late, and a lot of that information is pretty dry, too. For people like me, who just use their computers and don't think too much about why or how they work, reading through the description of what a specific trojan does makes my hair hurt. So it's really good to see that Microsoft has stepped up and created its own Online Safety Guide, and has done it in a way that will make ordinary users be more likely to pay attention.

Speaking of safety, Sophos recently issued a paper that didn't really surprise me at all. There is a reason that, between my other half and me, we get probably three or four dozen offers a day for various "experience enhancement drugs": it's highly profitable. It costs these guys next to nothing to send out a couple of million emails, and it only takes a few orders for them to be making good money. And who is going to complain to anyone about ordering prescription drugs illegally?

Along the same lines, most businesses don't have policies in place about their employees' use of social networking sites, either on or off the job (I just hope they aren't the same businesses who don't secure personal data). To me, it's kind of a non-issue. I think that if someone is dumb enough to post a rant about his boss on his Facebook page and gets fired over it -- well, he's the one who decided to write the rant. But I don't think it's a good idea for a business to tell him he can't write it. And am I the only one who can't see the contradiction in the "anonymity of the web" and the idea that "if you post something on the net, it's there forever"?

New Certificates