How Do GOOD Programmer or IT Ask Questions?

I spend a lot of time on stackoverflow.com and I've seen my fair share of questions. Some good, others leave you wondering how the hell some people made it this far. Good Programmer have learned how to ask questions to get the best possible answer in the shortest amount of time.

First of all, let me say this. If you consider yourself a developer and don't find yourself wanting to ask questions on a daily basis, you're doing something wrong. Asking questions without being afraid of humiliating yourself is critical.

Let me throw out a few pointers that I've gathered from reading hundreds (if not thousands) of different questions on sites like stackoverflow, experts-exchange, and other various forum-type sites.

1. Don't be afraid to over-describe your problem. Some people seem to be afraid to muck up a question with speculation, code-snippets, or extraneous details. When, in fact, many times these elements can be vital to help figuring out one's dilemma. Of course there is a limit, don't post your entire class library, unless requested, and expect unpaid volunteers to sift through everything.
2. Include error messages. If I see another question that has some variation of the phrase "It doesn't work" or "It failed" I'll flip my lid. People need to know precisely how you know something failed. What you think might be the obvious outcome of a particular situation may not be clear to everyone else. So make sure to clearly define in your question What you expected to happen, and exactly what happened instead no matter how trivial it might seem.
3. Briefly list out your environment particulars. Aside: This is starting to sound a little bit like my other write-up 'Things I Hate - People Who Do-Not Know How to Report Bugs'. Environment variables are far too often overlooked. Take a few seconds and list out a few pertinent details like software used, version numbers, etc.
4. Speculate! I hinted at this before but narrating your own question can be extremely helpful. Sometimes, your situation may seem so bat-crazy to others that they have no clue what you're trying to accomplish. Including a few blurbs about your thought process can allow readers pinpoint where you went awry and explain why.
5. Examples. It may not come to this but sometimes examples are the only way to accurately describe your question/situation. Start with snippets of code and expand from there. If you're working with the web it might be worth it to setup a quick and dirty demonstration page that others can view. For things like CSS questions this is sometimes the only way for others to know what you mean.
6. Phrase the question so that you not only obtain the answer, but learn how to research similar questions in the future. This one really irks me. There are countless habitual abusers of stackoverflow that ask up to 50 questions a day that could be just as easily been placed into Google and click I'm Feeling Lucky. Self-exploration and research should ALWAYS be the first step before posting a question. You will learn tons more by trying to find the answer yourself. Even if you don't find the final solution you were looking for you may discover other unknown tidbits of knowledge or some sort of work-around given by another frustrated developer. Failing that, include your research strategy in the body of your question so that, along with the answer, others can suggest where you may have gone wrong with your Google searches.
7. Don't get offended by responses. Most of the time, people leaving answers or additional questions are doing so in their spare time (or at work slacking off). If you post a question and someone leaves a response asking if you checked a variable to make sure it contained what you think it should contain don't go off on them. You might be inclined to respond with something like 'Of course I checked. Do you think I'm stupid? That's the first place I checked! You're lame for even asking that!' This may seem over the top but, believe it or not, I've seen worse. Like I said, assume NOTHING when asking questions or posting follow-ups. Unless the user is obviously being malicious or trolling you should always kill them with kindness.

Just a few simple things to keep in mind. Be humble, specific, and realize that everyone has been in your situation at some point. No one has all the answers, and if they did they certainly got some help from those around them.

10 Secret Facebook Features You Need To Be Using.

1. Create a group of people to hide your photos from

Using Facebook's "Lists" feature, it's easy to make a list of people you want to hide your pictures from.
Whether it's parents, coworkers, or anybody else, all you need to do is put them all into a "List." To do it, click Account in the top right corner, then click "Edit Friends."
Click "Create a List," then find friends and add them to your new list and name your list something you can remember. Next, click Account again but this time click Privacy Settings afterwards.
Click "Custom" in the left panel, then "Customize settings" below the chart. Scroll down to anything you want to hide, click the drop down menu next to it, then click "Custom" yet again. Yes--this takes a while. Facebook likes people to be open.
Finally, under "Hide" enter in the name of the group you just created, and you're done. To be extra sure, go back to the top of this screen and click "Preview my Profile," then enter the name of a person in the list you created to see how your profile will look to them.

2. Use these quick tips to make viewing photos a lot better experience.


Does anyone actually like the new photo viewer on Facebook?
I'm talking about the one that makes Facebook look like a slideshow.
If you hate it, all you need to do is wait for the picture to finish loading, then click refresh in your browser. You'll be taken to the old fashioned photo page that looks like the one pictured at right.
Another useful photo-browsing tip is using your arrow keys to navigate a ton of pictures. Hold down the left or right arrow key to see your life flash before your eyes.

3. Remove apps you aren't using anymore--they still have access to all your information



When you install Facebook apps or permissions, the apps often get access to your wall, pictures, friends, and more.
It's easy to change your privacy settings, but not as easy to remember that apps can still mine your information even when you're not using them.
Click Account in the top right corner, then Privacy Settings, then "Edit Your Settings" under Apps And Websites in the bottom left of the privacy screen. Then click "Edit Settings" to the right of the Apps You Use panel.
Click the little gray "x" to the right of any apps you no longer use, and they'll no longer have access to your information.

4. Enable these handy security features to make sure your account doesn't get compromised.

Two features we had no idea existed (until we scoured Facebook's settings) were the HTTPS setting and the Login Notifications setting.
If you enable HTTPS, it greatly reduces your chance of getting your password swiped when logging into Facebook on a public Wi-Fi at Starbucks.
If you enable Login Notifications, you'll get an email whenever someone logs onto your Facebook account from an unrecognized.



5. Personalize your Facebook URL, making it easier for people to find you


Many people use Facebook and LinkedIn as the bases of their business lives, and it's nice to have an easy to remember URL you can refer people to.
Click "Account" in the top right, then click "change" next to Username. Type in something you like, then check the availability to see if anyone has taken it.
Your new username will create a URL for you, facebook.com/ellishamburger is an example.




6. See a picture you like? Download it in full quality

Since Facebook switched gears to their new slideshow-ish picture browser, you can no longer drag pictures to your desktop to save them.
Screen grabbing is annoying, so look down in the bottom corner of the picture viewer and click "Download" to get a full-quality copy of the image you're looking at.







7. Wish you could see all your friends' birthdays in iCal, Outlook, or Google Calendar?


This could be a little overwhelming for people with tons of Facebook friends they don't talk to, but for many, this quick tip could be a big time-saver.
All you need to do is access your birthday page by clicking here, then scrolling down to the very bottom and clicking "Export Birthdays."
Click the link to subscribe to the Birthdays calendar using your computer's default calendar app. Or, open up your favorite calendar app and add a calendar subscription. If you don't know how, Google how to add subscriptions for your calendar. Then, copy in the link from Facebook.

8. Grab Facebook's Desktop Notifications apps to always stay up to date

MAC
Using the official desktop notifier for Mac, you'll get a Facebook icon in your menu bar that turns blue when you have a new notification. It's a
PC
Grab Internet Explorer 9 and pin the Facebook website to your taskbar. You'll see a red asterisk whenever you have a new notification. Or, try Facebook Desktop, a more feature-packed solution.



9. Wish you could post to several friends' walls at once?

All you need to do is tag friends in a post on your wall, or on anyone else's wall. Your post will show up on every persons' wall that you tag.
When you're typing a status or wall post, type the @ sign and then a friends' name. It will tag them in your post, and they'll see it on their wall as if it were a normal wall post.






10. Facebook's new Groups feature is a lot more powerful than it used to be


With Facebook's new Groups (which you create by clicking "Create Group" in your left navigation bar), you can essentially create your own listserv for a group of friends.
When you view a group, you'll see updates from friends, have the ability to edit documents together ("Create Doc" in right bar inside your group), chat together in a private chat room, and send out updates.
Create a group for your closest friends, or for your fantasy baseball team, or for anything else. If you want to leave a group, all you do is click the little gray "x" next to its name in the left navigation bar of Facebook.

How to Protect an Email Account from being Hacked

Today in this post I’ll teach you how to protect your email account from being hacked. Nowadays I get a lot of emails where most of the people say “My Email account is hacked please help…”. Now one question which arises in our mind is: “Is it so easy to hack an email account? OR Is it so difficult to protect an email account from being hacked?”. The single answer to these two questions is “Absolutely NOT!”. It is neither easy to hack an email nor difficult to protect an email account from being hacked.

If this is the case, then what is the reason for many people to lose their accounts?
The answer is very simple. They don’t know how to protect themselves from being hacked! In fact most of the people who lose their email accounts are not the victims of hacking but the victims of Trapping. They lose their passwords not because they are hacked by some expert hackers but they are fooled to such an extent that they themselves give away their password.
Are you confused? If so continue reading and you’ll come to know…
Now I’ll mention some of the most commonly used online scams which fool people and make them lose their passwords. I’ll also mention how to protect your email account from these scams.

1. WEBSITE SPOOFING
Website spoofing is the act of creating a website, with the intention of misleading the readers. The website will be created by a different person or organisation (Other than the original) especially for the purposes of cheating. Normally, the website will adopt the design of the target website and sometimes has a similar URL.
For example a Spoofed Website of Yahoo.com appears exactly same as Yahoo Website. So most of the people believe that it is the original site and lose their passwords. The main intention of spoofed websites is to fool users and take away their passwords. For this,the spoofed sites offer fake login pages. These fake login pages resemble the original login pages of sites like Yahoo,Gmail,Orkut etc. Since it resemble’s the original login page people beleive that it is true and give away their username and passwords by trying to login to their accounts.

Solution:
• Never try to login/access your email account from the sites other than the original site.
• Always type the URL of the site in the address bar to get into the site. Never click on the hyperlink to enter the site.

2. BY USING KEYLOGGERS
The other commonly used method to steal password is by using a Keylogger. A Keylogger is nothing but a spyware. The detailed description of keylogger and it’s usage will discussed in the post Hacking an email account. If you read this post you’ll come to know that it is too easy to steal the password using a keylogger program. If you just access your email account from a computer installed with keylogger, you definitely lose your password. This is because the keylogger records each and every keystroke that you type.

Solution:
Protecting yourselves from a keylogger scam is very easy.Just install a good anti-spyware program and update it regularly. This keeps your PC secure from a keylogger. Also there is a program called Anti-keylogger which is specially designed to detect and remove keyloggers. You can use this program to detect some stealth keyloggers which remain undetected by many anti-spyware programs.

3. ACCESSING YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT FROM CYBER CAFES
Do you access your email from cyber cafes? Then definitely you are under the risk of loosing your password.In fact many people lose their email account in cyber cafes. For the owner of the cyber cafe it’s just a cakewalk to steal your password. For this he just need’s to install a keylogger on his computers. So when you login to your email account from this PC, you give away your password to the cafe owner. Also there are many Remote Administration Tools (RATs) which can be used to monitor your browsing activities in real time.
This doesn’t mean that you should never use cyber cafes for browsing the internet. I know, not all the cyber cafe owners will be so wicked but it is recommended not to use cafes for accessing confidential information. If it comes to the matter of security never trust anyone, not even your friend. I always use my own PC to login to my accounts to ensure safety.
So with this I conclude my post and assume that I have helped my readers to protect their email accounts from being hacked. Please pass your comments…

4 Ways to Identify Safe Websites on the Internet

On the whole Internet, there are approximately more than 150 million active websites up and running. As a result, it often becomes a real challenge for the users to identify safe websites that are trustworthy and reputed. Have you ever wondered to know the reputation of a website before placing the order? Need to know whether a given website is child safe? Well, here are some of the ways to identify safe websites on the Web.


1. WOT or Web Of Trust (www.mywot.com):

WOT is a great place to test the reputation of your favorite website. WOT gives real-time ratings for every website based on the feedback that it gets from millions of trustworthy users across the globe and trusted sources, such as phishing and malware blacklists. Each domain name is evaluated based on this data and ratings are applied to them accordingly.


When you enter the web address, a result will appear, the reputation of each website is shown in terms of 4 components where green means excellent, yellow warns users to be cautious and red indicates potential danger.


Trustworthiness signifies the overall safety of the website. A poor rating may indicate that the site is associated with threats like Internet scams, phishing, identity theft risks and malware. For more information on phishing, you may refer my other post on how to identify and avoid phishing scams.


Vendor reliability tells you whether a given site is safe for carrying out buy and sell transactions with it. An excellent rating indicates superior customer satisfaction while a poor rating indicates possible scam or bad shopping experience.


Privacy indicates about “to what extent the site respects the privacy of it’s users and protects their personal identity and data”.


Child Safety indicates whether the content of a given site is appropriate for children. Site contents like sexual material, nudity and vulgarity will have a poor Child Safety rating.


In most cases, the WOT ratings are found to be highly accurate. To check the reputation of any given website, just visit www.mywot.com type-in the address of your favorite website and click on “Check now”. This tool alone can tell you a lot about the reputation and safety level of a website. However, in addition to this, I am giving you another 3 handy tools to identify safe websites on the Web.


2. McCafee SiteAdvisor:

McCafee SiteAdvisor is a free tool that is available as a browser add-on. It adds safety ratings to your browser and search engine results. You can download it from www.siteadvisor.com.


3. StopBadware:

Using this tool, you can check whether a given site is said to have involved in malware activity in the past. To check this, go to http://www.stopbadware.org/home/reportsearch and enter the URL or domain name of a website and click on “Search Clearinghouse ”. If the search does not return any result, that means the site was never involved in any of the malware activity in the past.


4. Google Pagerank:

Google PageRank is another great tool to check the reputation and popularity of a website. The PageRank tool rates every webpage on a scale of 1 to 10 which indicates Google’s view of importance of the page. If a given website has a PageRank of less than 3, then it is said to be less popular among the other sites on the Internet.


However, PageRank will only tell you how much popular a given website is and has nothing to do with the safety level of a website. So, this tool alone cannot be used to evaluate a website’s safety and other factors.


PageRank feature is available as a part of Google Toolbar. You can install Google Toolbar from http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/toolbar/ie/index.html.

Do you know how to test you Anti-Vrus Software?

Have you ever wondered how to test your Antivirus software to ensure it’s proper working? Well here is a quick and easy way to test your antivirus. The process is called EICAR test which will work on any antivirus and was developed by European Institute of Computer Antivirus Research. This process can be used by people, companies and antivirus programmers to test the proper functioning of the antivirus/antimalware software without having to deal with the real computer virus which can cause damage to the computer. Here is a step-by-step procedure to test your antivirus.

1. Open a notepad (New Text Document.TXT) and copy the following code exactly onto it, and save the notepad.

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

2. Rename the file from New Text Document.TXT to myfile.com

3. Now run the antivirus scan on this myfile.com file.

If the antivirus is functioning properly on your computer, then it should generate a warning and immediately delete the file upon scanning. Otherwise you may have to re-install your antivirus.
NOTE: Most antivirus will pop-out a warning message in the Step-1 itself

You can also place the myfile.com file in a ZIP or RAR file and run a scan on it so as to ensure whether your antivirus can detect the test string in the compressed archive. Any antivirus when scanning this file will respond exactly as it will do for a genuine virus/malicious code. This test will cause no damage to your computer even though the antivirus will flag it as a malicious script. Hence it is the safest method to test the proper functioning of any antivirus.

What computer users should know, but don't.

Following is a list of what I think is the absolute minimum a computer user should know to be able to keep their machine running as problem free as possible. I would also say that most of, if not all of, these things are not followed by the majority of people.



Know your operating system. Knowing what operating system and version you have is a great help for when you have problems and need outside help. It also helps for when you wish to install programs so you can choose the correct one for your operating system.
Know your file system. It is all very well to create files but if you do not know where those files are saved, or how to look for them, then you will have problems. You will also need to know which files are yours and which ones are required for the operating system. Just deleting files you don't know about to create space will also create major headaches.
Perform regular operating system maintenence. This can include things like defragmenting the hard disk or scanning for malware, cleaning out temporary files or internet caches and removing old unused programs.
Understand how to install programs. Every computer you purchase, beg, borrow or steal (just kidding) will need to have some programs installed on it. If you don't understand (notice I didn't use the word know) how programs are installed and where they go you can open a world of woe.
Regularly update installed programs. Most programs nowdays have some sort of update mechanism. These need to be used and taken notice of when updates are available. Computer updates fix bugs and security problems and help keep the computer running smoothly.
Read and understand messages and alerts shown by the computer.These messages and alerts are not just something to be clicked away and discounted. They are shown for a reason and could very well save your bank account from being syphoned off to an account in Nigeria.
Talk the talk. I don't mean be able to state how many nibbles there are in a byte or mix with ease in a Star Trek convention. You do need to know the difference between a cup holder and a CDROM drive tray. Apart from the hardware names you should also know terminology specific to the software you are using. This helps you understand when help is offered and also enables you to convey your difficulties in an intelligent manner.
Read The Fine Manuals. Or as is most often the case, the help files which come with any professionaly designed program. They are there for a purpose, to enable you to effectively use the program and give you the biggest bang for your buck so to speak. By reading the manuals or help files you can understand features which can save you many hours of wasted time. We all know time is money right? :)
Take appropriate security measures. Lets face it. You have something which a lot of people want. Your identity. As the time of the Borg is not yet here and you have not been assimilated you need to protect your identity, money and even your life. This means ensuring you have the appropriate and up to date malware protection as well as some basic security measures like not using the administrative (or root) account for general computing use.



As you can see it is a very short list. Using a computer is not hard and getting even easier with every new operating system being released. To be able to keep using that computer as it was designed to be used then I believe the above list is an absolute must. Unfortunately, much to the chagrin of those who service computers, these things are not even remotely followed by the general public. Who's fault is that? What do you think needs to be added or removed from the list?

What makes a good IT professional

The world of IT is large. In it there are a lot of different types of people. Some are good, some are bad, some are mediocre and some are brilliant. Although I like to think I am one of the brilliant ones I am sure that others will disagree. So what separates the good from the bad.

Everybody has different reasons to get into IT and there are too many to list so I am not going to get into it. One thing the best IT professionals have in common is a passion for their work. To them it is not work but a way of life. They eat, live and breathe IT, especially the particular facet they specialize in. To them eight hours in front of a computer is not enough. It is not just work it is a knowledge base, it is entertainment, it is relaxation, it is life! A reason for living, a thing of excitement where change is welcome and advances in technology are eagerly awaited.

But that in itself does not make a good IT professional. The one thing that I would say is most important. The only thing that leaps the dividing line from the good and the bad is the ability to solve problems. Our profession is usually a case of one problem after another that needs to be solved. This continuous problem solving, often the same problems over and over again with minor variations that are enough to make it interesting, are what gives us our zest for the industry.

However just being able to solve problems is not enough. The speed at which we can solve problems is most important. A common saying in business is that time is money. What this translates to is pressure on us to solve the problem in the smallest amount of time. Generally the bigger the problem, the less time we have to solve it and an exponential amount of pressure from the higher ups to find that solution. This means that often to find a solution we not only have to think logically but also laterally. About ninety nine percent of solutions to our problems can be found on the Internet, unless we have some new technology that is hot out of the factory, so the better we can search on the Internet the quicker we can find solutions to our problems.

That is what makes a good IT person. Not willingness, although that does play a big part in learning to become a good IT person. Not intelligence as some people can be very intelligent at some things but totally brain dead in other areas. Not perseverance as even though it will find the answer in the end it can be too late. No it is the ability to research and solve problems in the quickest amount of time. That ability can be learned or it can come naturally but it is a needed ability to make you a good IT professional.

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