In a way I feel I’m about to blow my own cover with this post. But I’m pretty sure many people will find this really useful. I seem to have a reputation for knowing everything. People always come to me with their computer problems and I’m nearly always able to find a solution. When I help Macro Scheduler customers with obscure VBScript, ODBC, or Win32 API, issues they often ask “How the hell do you know this stuff?”.
The truth is I very often don’t have the answers immediately. Sometimes a support ticket will come in or I’ll see a forum post and I’ll be no more able to answer it than anyone else. But I have my secret weapons. And the fact is anyone else can use them too.
My favourite and most useful resource is Usenet. I take Usenet for granted, but I’ve realised lately that many people these days don’t know what Usenet is. Usenet is an email like distributed discussion system that was invented at Duke University (North Carolina, USA) by two graduate students in 1979. Yes, you heard that right, the best resource for answering technical questions for state-of-the-art problems is 27 years old! With Usenet, users read, post and reply to messages to a huge number of ‘newsgroups’ on all manner of topics. Newsgroups are distributed across ‘news servers’ throughout the Internet. Most ISPs have a news server that their subscribers can access.
Usenet is home to all sorts of weird and wonderful topics. Discussions of all sorts take place in Usenet. There are literally thousands and thousands of groups. Many I’d rather have nothing at all to do with! But Usenet is also the domain of programmers, technical whizkids and geeks of all varieties. And since it has been around for so long there’s almost no technical issue, programming problem or computer scenario that hasn’t been discussed at some point. So it is the perfect place to go to find out how to build that bit of VBScript, use a Win32 API function, or fix a problem in XP.
But Usenet is a bit tricky to use. You need to be able to access a news server and then you need a news reader, which is like an email client. You need to subscribe to relevant groups and then you get overwhelmed as thousands of posts pour in. And then somehow you need a way to search the content.
So Usenet is great for day to day discussions, but how do you tap this resource as a knowledge base? Well you may have heard of a company called Google. A while back Google bought a system called Deja News which archived every Usenet post since 1981. The system is now called Google Groups. It continues to archive Usenet postings as well as Google’s own web based discussion groups. It can be accessed at groups.google.com. As you probably know, Google is quite good for searching for stuff. Google Groups is no different. It combines the power of Google’s search with the massive resource of Usenet. With Google Groups you can search for pretty much any technical matter you need help with. And 99% of the time you’ll find an answer, often from a technical guru who knows his stuff, or someone who has had the same problem already.
I find that people tend to turn to Google, or one of the other search engines, to try to find answers. But specific technical questions can be hard to locate on Google, because Google indexes web sites, and even if the issue is dealt with by a web site it may be hidden deep within it’s bowels. So a web search engine isn’t always the best way to find answers to technical problems. In contrast Google Groups indexes only messages that people, like geeks and programmers, have written, and so it gets straight to the crux of the matter. It’s also instant. Pretty much as soon as a Usenet message is posted, it shows up in Google Groups. In contrast a web site can take months before it is fully indexed. So Usenet is often more up to date on technical matters.
As an example you will probably find more discussion of Vista technical issues and Vista specific programming techniques in Usenet than anywhere on the web. Long before Vista is released, beta testers, Microsoft experts and C++ gurus have been discussing such concepts via Usenet for months. And you can find this stuff now with Google Groups.
So now you know! I’m not such an expert after all. I just know where to find the answers. In my next post, I’ll explain how to get the most out of Google Groups and give you some tips on how to search and narrow down on what you’re looking for.
