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November 25, 2009 >> Happy Thanksgiving

What's New at Experts Exchange
News, A Savant and Geniuses, and Kudos

Editors' Choice Articles
The best of the best

How to Write a Limerick
Who says Experts Exchange is all about serious?

Tips From the Moderators
Ease up on the Object button

How To Fix An Unhealty Company
ericpete follows up on an old item

More News and Notes
Pardon us while we giggle hysterically

Nata's Corner
On avoiding Black Friday (and finding the deals)

New Certificates
New certificate holders, through November 21

What's New at Experts Exchange

What's new: Several new features have been pushed in the last two weeks:

• File types: About thirty-five new file types have been added to the list of files that can be uploaded as part of a question, comment or article.
• Points for articles: Last issue, we noted the increases in points assigned by the Page Editors; now, if an article is used in a comment, and that comment is selected as the answer to a question, the article's author will receive points.
• Releases: As noted in our last issue, Experts Exchange has decided to do releases on Mondays, with a follow-up release, if necessary, on Thursdays; the Thursday release will be solely to fix any missed bugs from the prior release. Apropos of the latter, we want to welcome scrutinizer to the Experts Exchange family; he is EE's new head of quality control.

New Page Editor: We want to welcome our good friend harfang to the list of Page Editors. In addition to having a truly unique sense of humor, his Articles and Typography: a brief manual is a Must-Read for anyone writing an article at Experts Exchange. Welcome aboard, harfang!

New Savant, Geniuses: mlmcc has become the seventh member of Experts Exchange to receive his Savant stripes for earning over 10,000,000 points in a single zone; his award comes in Crystal Reports. CEHJ has earned his second Genius certificate, this one in New To Java, and it goes along with his Savant certificate in Java Programming. Finally, rrjegan17 has earned his second Genius certificate, this one coming in MS SQL Server.

Milestones:

• capricorn1 has earned 15,000,000 points overall, and has earned 13,000,000 points in the Microsoft Access zone.
• Last issue, we noted that angelIII had become the first member to have more than 5,000,000 points in each of two zones; this week, he became the first member to have more than 3,000,000 points in each of three zones.
• Mestha has earned over 6,000,000 points in the Exchange Server zone, while mplungjan has reached that level in the JavaScript zone.
• saurabh726 has earned 5,000,000 points overall, and has earned over 5,000,000 points in the Microsoft Excel zone.

Kudos: spamless was having some issues with a JavaScript function that converts regular time to military time; it wasn't until mplungjan happened on the question that he found syntax errors. spamless' comment in the thread says it all: "mplungjan you are amazing! Everyone should get on their knees and bow down to you. Thank you very much."

Fun and Games: Carol Burnett nails it at about the 2:17 mark (thanks, Anita!).

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Tips From the Moderators

Image from our new favorite website, This Is Indexed. A warning, though: it's addictive.

Okay, so we're trying to be a little bit funny, but here's the thing. For the most part, people come to Experts Exchange because they need some help solving a problem, and they expect the Experts to give it to them -- and most of the time, the system works. People ask, they get the answer, and they close the question.

But there are occasions when someone knows just enough to be dangerous -- or worse, knows a lot about something marginally related, but hasn't taken the time to read the whole discussion before suggesting something that has already been suggested. Then, when the Asker selects someone else's comment as the answer, the Expert throws a hissy fit because he thinks his contribution has been ignored.

Our rule of thumb has always been "first in with the answer wins". Generally speaking, we think the Asker knows what works for him, and while it may be less-than-perfect advice, we're not likely to overrule him, even if it means he's going to have to come back and ask how to undo the mistake he made three months ago by following that advice.

But getting upset or angry about it is really taking things a little too seriously. It's almost the holidays, so put on a little Christmas music, fix yourself a nice warm cup of tea, and move on to the next question; there are plenty of other people who you can help.

Editors' Choice Articles

The following articles have been designated as Editors' Choice by the Page Editors. 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.

Dlookup and the Domain Functions, by JDettman:

3 Ways to Speed Up MySQL, by gr8gonzo:

IIS7 installation errors - Error Code 0x80070643, by tigermatt:

Excel - Using a Sheet Tab as a Button for Expanding/Collapsing Supplementary Sheets., by alainbryden:

Use CHtmlEditCtrl to Create a Simple HTML Editor, by DanRollins:

Using Regular Expressions in Visual Basic for Applications and Visual Basic 6, by matthewspatrick:

MALWARE - "An Ounce of Prevention...", by younghv:

Articles and Typography: a brief manual, by harfang:

Advanced DOS batch pitfalls, by Qlemo:

How to Write a Limerick

Over the past few months, we have frequently noted DanRollins' seemingly insatiable capacity to write articles. While this one doesn't seem particularly noteworthy from a technological perspective, it does have some significance: that not everything at Experts Exchange is about the points.

A limerick is a kind of short, light-hearted poem that is typically humorous and traditionally often ribald or lecherous. The key characteristic is that there is some sort of "punch line" at the end.

Almost anyone can create a poem in the limerick format. It's much trickier to create one that actually works; that is, one that that has a flawless meter, a free-flowing introduction, and a "surprise" at the end.

The aim of this article is to provide some practical advice to help you write limericks. Knowing how to write limericks -- even high-quality limericks -- will not increase your salary, help you meet beautiful women, or improve your golf game. There is no value whatsoever in knowing how to write good limericks. So, why are you wasting your time reading this?

First, let's look at the format. Here's a well-known limerick, probably written in the early 1900s -- very topical at a time all the newspapers were reporting about Einstein's intriguing new Theory:

Limericks are always exactly five lines with the rhyming scheme of:

    AA BB A

The first two lines rhyme (Bright, light) and they set you up for the final line (night). The "middle two" (lines 3 and 4) are a bridge to get you from one part to the other. They rhyme with each other (day, way).

Read the rest of the article.

How To Fix An Unhealty Company

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

About four years ago, we wrote an article about a study that described the attributes of an unhealthy company -- one that was pretty much out of touch with its market, its customers and its future. When we posted it at Experts Exchange, we really didn't think much about it until a few days ago when lherrou, one of EE's Page Editors, asked "so what do you do to help one?"

We wrote a longish response to his question, but it got us thinking about the Booz-Allen hypothesis that unhealthiness is in a company's genes, and our own experience with a variety of companies. What, if anything, can you do to help?

The short answer: not much when it gets down to it. The slightly longer answer is akin to that of how many Californians does it take to change a light bulb: Only one, but it has to want to change.

The world evolves. Species adapt to a changing world or they die. Unfortunate? Perhaps, although it does seem a little arrogant of us to think that we can "fix" situations like that without impacting something else. Mother Nature isn't just a tough old bird; she's a smart one too, and just when you think you have her figured out, she's likely to bite you on the butt with a new virus or a weather pattern or an earthquake.

The economic world isn't really much different. Companies don't start out unhealthy (okay, quite a few do, but they don't last long) and they are always a reflection of their founders and management, and of the standards, processes and goals they have. But what is critical is that once that "genetic material" -- the DNA of the company -- gets established, it permeates the company's future, and it takes more than just a change of management to turn that around.

We're going to make a prediction: Carol Bartz, the new CEO of Yahoo, has her work cut out for her -- and we don't think that anything short of severe major surgery is going to be successful in the long run.

Here's the problem Ms. Bartz faces. When Yahoo started, it was, for all intents and purposes, a list of bookmarks, with the facility to search through those links to find what you were looking for. If you wanted to be listed in Yahoo, you had to ask and be approved. Not a problem, until a few other companies started saying "who are we to decide what people should be able to look at?" and built their own versions of what we now know as the search companies.

But Yahoo took a different approach. It wanted to be everyone's home page, everyone's bookmarks list. So it added this, and created departments for that, and tried to become what had already failed at AOL: everything to everyone, only without the CDs. It had no real focus; it just did whatever its founder wanted to do. Its whimsical name reflected the whimsical nature of Jerry Yang and the people he hired. They set the agenda, created the processes and hired the people to do the work.

Over the years, Yahoo reached the top of the charts -- the most visited site on the Internet; it still holds two of the top ten sites. But it suffered from flaws rooted in its lack of focus:

• People might start at Yahoo, but didn't stay at Yahoo. It was a jumping off place, which meant that its advertising wasn't as effective. If advertising doesn't work well, then you have to lower the price in order to sell the inventory.
• People had no loyalty to Yahoo. You might go to Yahoo for your [free] fantasy football league, or you might download Yahoo's [free] instant messenger, or even use its [free] email service. But you didn't spend the day paying much attention to anything that was going to take money out of your pocket; nothing Yahoo provided couldn't be found elsewhere. Every time Yahoo tried to monetize something, people left.
• Yahoo never got really great at anything; most of what it did was adequate at best. Its search returned mediocre results. Its email was fine until the newsletter you wanted to receive got blocked by Yahoo. Its news coverage was eclipsed by original content from first sources. The interface grew into a cluttered mess as features were added.

And it is all an outgrowth of wanting to be everyone's list of bookmarks. Mr Yang may be gone -- but his original vision is still integral to what Yahoo is. The home page today? Sleeker, but still a laundry list of everything from cricket (I've never seen a cricket game and know virtually nothing about it) to YouTube (owned by Google, the last I heard) to a weather page. But there's nothing particularly compelling about it, and for the most part, it's still just links. Mr Yang is still calling the shots.

The secret to "fixing" a company isn't really a secret; we have frequently referred to the Cluetrain Manifesto, a remarkable document that offers a lot of advice around one central theme: if you want to run a successful business, you had better talk with (and listen to) your customers, because your customers are definitely talking amongst themselves.

We live in a self-centered, self-absorbed world. What you want, as a business owner, isn't relevant; what your customers want is all that matters to them, and they're the ones with the checkbooks. No longer can Microsoft tell corporate accounts "here's what you're going to use" because the profit center -- the onesies and twosies who buy off the shelf -- is going to say "no thanks; we'll wait until Windows 7 comes out and THEN we'll see if we really need to upgrade."

The other secret to fixing a company like Yahoo -- or any other company that is seeing its business and revenue stagnate -- is to do what my better half does with her roses: she prunes relentlessly every fall. If what the company is doing isn't working, then you have to backtrack to when it was working, and start over. You have to figure out where you went wrong, get rid of all the junk that has accumulated since then, and then restart.

Not many companies are willing to do that. "Failure is not an option" -- but mostly because it means that somewhere along the way, management screwed up, and the admission of that is perceived to look bad on a resume. Instead of questioning the company's mission -- not that jargon-filled, marketing-speak document you hang on the wall, but the real purpose of the company -- it's a lot easier to find cheaper supply lines, cut payroll, and then say that you're fine even though income is flat.

One final thought. When we joined Experts Exchange, we were working for a company whose boss "got it" when it came to doing business. He started out selling those big tape reels you see in movies from the 1970s; when we worked for him, the company was just beginning to ask their customers if they were interested in VoIP, and most weren't. But when those customers started to ask about it, the company was ready to help provide what the customers wanted. The company's focus -- providing whatever products and services its customers need -- has never changed, even though we can count at least half a dozen changes in their primary source of revenue.

Like the Yankees, he doesn't rebuild his company; he reloads.

More News and Notes

Pardon us while we giggle hysterically: Verizon has been running some commercials lately that portray poor little AT&T as having significantly less coverage for its wireless service. We're here to tell you that we can use our AT&T phones just fine -- as long as we don't drive three miles to the west -- y'know, away from the Sierras and toward a city that has a population of four digits or more -- at which point the phone is worthless except as a clock for at least half an hour. AT&T, its corporate mission being to keep attorneys immune from the vagaries of unemployment, sued and was politely told to grow up by a federal judge. Meanwhile, AT&T's partner in providing less-than-stellar phone service has been on the wrong end of Motorola ads that iDon't (sorry -- couldn't resist) mention that as a phone, using AT&T's system exclusively, it's not getting better. Disclaimer: your humble editor lives in a part of California where AT&T's land-based service offerings are politely described as meagre, and whose cellular offerings would be non-existent had they not bought Cingular a few years back. Any portrayal of Ma Bell in a less-than-flattering light is therefore deliberate and unapologetic.

We can't quite figure out how these three items came together, but they did: 1. China is under cyberattack (not surprising since they're spying). 2. A Chinese company is mad at Microsoft. 3. The US still controls Internet domain names.

We'll just give you a mulligan: Not quite twenty years ago, a couple of guys killed an actor (there's a Shakespeare joke in there just crying to get out) in Germany, a fact duly noted in the actor's biography on Wikipedia. Now, the two men (who have paid their debt to society under German law) are suing Wikipedia to have their names removed because under German law, their right to privacy is being violated.

Riiiiiiiiight ... but maybe it should have been...

Build a better mousetrap, and that small portion of the world that isn't already doing so will beat a path to your door: (and you'll get to yank the corporate chain of those people up in Redmond while you're at it)... The source code for Google's Chrome OS is now available. We haven't seen a review that says it's so-so, but someone will figure out a reason to write that. TechCrunch was kind enough to come up with an installation guide; Articles101 would love to see an article about it. And speaking of better mousetraps, the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers is out, and if they haven't already, CERN is going to try to jump start the Large Hadron Collider this week. Side note: It's number 9 on Newsweek's ten worst predictions.

Stuff you simply can't make up: Why the Moderators will live forever (thanks, Jason!). A woman posed as a teenager to catch her husband in a chat room (thanks, Anita!). Someone who is describing how to rip off Microsoft is also accepting advertising from them. Do you really want to trust the Internet to be your secret place? (thanks, Chris!) The Beginning, in code (okay, someone made this up, but it's still funny -- thanks, Leon!). The Internet version of "Open Other End" (thanks, Jason!). And with apologies to Hughes Mearns:

Site of the Week: Brizzly, which has the requisite cutesy icon and, among other things, makes Twitter's short URLs a bit less threatening.

Rethinking the Christmas shopping list: We're not particularly interested in "loyalty" programs; we do the Southwest one because we fly out of and into the cities where Southwest goes -- but we must have half a dozen of the little business cards from the local car wash and just as many from our favorite haircutters. But now we've got a little list of the merchants we won't be doing business with this holiday season, if only because they're complicit in ripping off people by selling names and credit card numbers -- at a tidy profit.

We have only one question: Why are public employees (paid by taxpayers, that is) using publicly purchased computers (your tax dollars at work) to use P2P software in the first place?

In requiem: Somehow, in all the hubbub over the past month or so, we neglected, to our everlasting shame, to note the passing of Geocities which, along with eBay's acquisition of Skype, ranks up there as one of the all-time great DotCom Misfires. As a tribute to all of the impressive web design that has now passed into the ether (though many similar samples are still viewable on MySpace), we offer a reasonable facsimile. Note of warning: Don't wear Bose headphones with the sound turned up.

Stupid movie industry tricks: In behavior perfectly appropriate for the greedy, sniveling leeches they are, the movie industry is spying on Redbox kiosks.

What part of "you're an idiot" don't you understand: Apple's lawyers didn't really have to work very hard to convince a federal judge that Psystar, the company selling Mac clones, violated Apple's patents and copyrights.

Stands for All Out (of) Luck: The good news (if you're a Time-Warner stockholder): you're not saddled with AOL for much longer. The bad news (if you're an AOL employee): The odds are one in three that you'll be actively out looking for work by Lincoln's birthday, and given AOL's track record on security, we doubt any ex-AOLers will be registering for the job fair in Arlington, just down the street from AOL's headquarters. We suspect there's one guy whose resume might need some polishing before sending it to Google. The company is also selling ICQ and is apparently thinking of dropping MapQuest too.

Interesting tidbit we all knew and have been ignoring for years: There's a reason that US manufacturers of technology open factories in other countries: cheap labor.

Signs of the Apocalypse: When it comes to texting while driving, parents are almost as stupid as their children; an entertainment company lawyer feels like a terrorist; and guess who wants to store more information about you.

Nata's Corner

My other half has been saying for a year now that there is no way in heaven and earth that he is going to get up at 3 am to go sit in some parking lot waiting for Black Friday -- the day after tomorrow -- just to pick up holiday shopping deals. Of course he's not (*wink wink*). But in the interests of serving our loyal readers, I thought I would share some information with you about what you might find out there if you look closely.

There aren't really that many secret deals; I've known for a couple of weeks that if you're in the market for an inexpensive computer, WalMart is going to have an HP desktop, including 20" monitor, for under $400 and an Apple iTouch, including a $50 iTunes gift card, for under $200; their ad was "leaked" early (*wink wink*), in part because last year, a temporary maintenance worker was trampled to death, and in part because the information is going to get out anyway. Best Buy even announced some Black Friday pricing last week -- but of course, you have to go to the store to find out what merchandise it's on, and c|net pointed out five deals you shouldn't miss. But here's a list of sources of Black Friday ads, a couple of days early:

• BlackFriday.info. Best thing about the site (besides all the ads) is that they run contests -- not that there's anything I really want, but they do.
• BlackFriday.net. Best thing about the site: comparison shopping. (WalMart still has the best price on the iTouch if you include the gift card.)
• TheBlackFriday.com. Best thing about the site is that you don't have to look at it all year. There's something wrong with a site that says it's best viewed at 1024x768 and has a horizontal scroll bar when you're looking at the site on a 1024x768 monitor. They do have a few stores other sites don't, though.
• BFAds.net. Best thing about the site: some nice guides for the technologically-challenged, like guides to the differences between notebooks and netbooks and items on whether or not to buy a BluRay player.
• GottaDeal.com. Best thing about the site: they've sorted through and picked out the best deals for you.
• Dealighted.com. Best thing about the site: they have some smaller and regional stores that might not be that well known.

The rest of the sites that are out there aren't much different from these. There are a few that are actually not much more than a scam; they want you to jump through hoops to get "free" products and then get other people to do the same thing. It's that time of year, friends -- the scam artists will be filling our inboxes (if they aren't already). Speaking of which, those emails saying that someone's getting ready to send out a payment for you? The app they want you to install is a trojan. But you knew that, right?

Also on the subject of shopping and things like credit card numbers, I came across an article about passwords that was enough to make me sit up and take notice. I don't do that much shopping on line, but given the amount of information companies are keeping on all of us -- and how insecure it really is -- I'm rethinking mine.

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