I'm writing today from the DSSS (Defense Special Security Systems) Conference in San Antonio. We're here showing Clearance Track, our product for security officers that helps organize and automate the clearance processes associated with getting and keeping your employees' clearances.

I was actually a little bit intimidated when we arrived and started setting up our booth yesterday -- our co-exhibitors rolled into the conference with crates taller than me full of degaussers (I had to google degausser), security doors, liquid scanners, extra large safes, alarm systems, and miscellaneous oversized, super-heavy equipment looking like it was taken from the set of a 1970s spy thriller.

The truth is, we don't have 2,000 pounds of awesomeness at our booth. Not even if you throw in our pop-up display and our booth babes. Our product is software, so our coolest item is a 30" Apple monitor that we borrowed from our CEO's desk on which we display the software. But we're holding our own. We have a product that people want. One of our first visitors took one look at Clearance Track and said to my co-worker, "you're my new best friend."

We thought we would come here and meet lots of security officers from small consulting companies like Near Infinity whose security officers were overwhelmed with processing clearances. But in talking to the attendees, we're finding more government folks charged with managing the clearance data for thousands of military or other government personnel. They use JPAS, but find it insufficient to report on and manage the details of their employees' clearances. They're getting by now with Excel spreadsheets, outdated Access databases, filing cabinets, and whatever info they can remember in their heads.

Clearance Track is a great solution for them. It provides a single, organized place to store all of their clearance data. It makes it easy to report on their secure personnel, easy to find documents related to that person's clearance, easy to pass off responsibilities from one security officer to another, easy to remember to renew a badge, easy to run tedious government reports, easy to auto-generate documents... Who doesn't need easy?

So far, the reaction has been great. Lots of people are raving about how helpful Clearance Track would be in their jobs, how user friendly it is, and how much time it would save them. With a day and a half left to go, we're not missing the heavy equipment too much.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better get back to our booth visitors!

Clearance Track is a fast, secure way to manage your clearances. By providing a single place to track your investigations, crossovers, badge renewals, briefings, and certs, Clearance Track significantly streamlines the security officer's job and provides a collaborative environment to organize and store employee data. Use it for 4311s, 4414s, 312s, SF-86s, visit certs, annual security refresher briefings, and key government reports.

We're in San Francisco this week at the Atlassian Summit lunching Mini Confluence Enterprise Edition -- a way to access Confluence on your iPhone, Blackberry, Palm or Android.

At last year's summit, we released Mini Confluence Personal Edition, an iPhone app that individual users can purchase from the app store and run based on Confluence's XML-RPC.

The new version is a custom plugin installed on the server. For people using an iPhone, they still download an app from the app store, but with the Enterprise Edition, it's free. For people with other mobile devices, they get to Mini Confluence through a web client.

This year's version is two times as fast as the original (!), and has some cool new features like filtering on the dashboard based on your favorites, status updates, landscape mode, and multiple user accounts. Find out more about Mini Confluence at www.miniconfluence.com.

We've been talking to lots of the conference attendees the past couple of days. Some of them have already been using the personal edition, and have given us feedback on that. Other people have ideas for MCEE, like an iPad version, support for Confluence instances protected by VPN, and even "make Mini Jira!"

I'm surprised by how many people here are on Android. It's still mostly iPhones, but a lot less Blackberry users than last year.

A lot of people have been signing up for the beta program -- we're sending out copies of the plugin for free to anyone who's interested and letting them try it out for three months. I'm anxious to hear the feedback so we can improve it before people start paying for it.

If you try it out, let us know what you think!

And now... I think it's time for some Ghirardelli Chocolate :-)

I was considering switching from PC to a Mac, but I have Adobe CS4 Design Premium and didn't want to pay the $1,799 to buy it again. It was surprisingly difficult to find any information about whether or not I could do it, and if so how. Some Adobe employees at a trade show even told me that it couldn't be done.

It turns out, though, that for $6.25 shipping and handling and the promise that you'll stop using and destroy your older version, they'll let you change. They call it Cross-Platform Swap. Here's how you do it:

1. Go to http://www.adobe.com/go/supportportal If you have an account, log in. If you don't, you'll need to create one.
   
   
2. Under Get Support, Click on Orders and Returns
   
   
3. Choose the issue type Return / Exchange / Refund and then click the button that says Proceed to Online Form
   
   
4. Fill out the form, typing Cross Platform Swap in the subject line. Submit.
   -- In the notes field, here's what I typed: I am switching to a Mac and would like to do a cross-platform swap. I understand that my existing copy must be destroyed as soon as the new one arrives.
   
   
5. The next day, you'll get an email saying your issue is resolved and providing no useful information. Instructions for what to do next are actually in the ticket itself, which you can get back to on the support portal. Here's what you do:
   -- Call 1-800-833-6687 and follow the prompts to customer service (#2 then #4)
   -- Have your case number and credit card ready
   -- Give them your credit card info and verify all your contact information
   

And that's it. They charge your credit card for $6.25 shipping and handling. Your old serial number gets invalidated, you destroy the old copy, and they send you the new one.

As a side note, here's a tip for getting customer service from Adobe: Instead of going to the support portal when you have a question, go to the pages on their website where they have prices and information about purchasing products. Almost immediately, you'll get a helpful person IMing you asking if they can help. These IM helpers are nowhere to be found (ironically) in the support section of their site.

Oh, and their customer support phone numbers aren't that easy to find, so here they are:
Adobe Customer Support: 1-800-585-0774 option #4
or
Adobe Customer Support: 1-800-833-6687 option #2 then option #4.
 
Good luck platform-swappers!

I tried a simple test today. I created identical graphics in Inkscape and Illustrator. Both had the same canvas size, same colors, shapes and text. Here's what the simple graphic looked like:

I saved the graphic in both programs as an SVG file. Inkscape created an SVG file that was 3K; Illustrator's was a ridiculous 473K. I wanted to know what caused the dramatic difference.

A co-worker suggested I open the SVG files in notepad and take a look. The Illustrator file contains many lines of garbage code, whereas the Inkscape file is simple and streamlined. To quantify it, I pasted the full text file into Word and counted the lines. The Illustrator file totaled 12,512 lines while the Inkscape file was only 89.

Is this sad showing the best Illustrator can do?  Fortunately for Adobe, it's not.

llustrator has hidden a very useful option in its "Save for Web" feature. In the thousands of times I've used this feature to quickly create cleanly compacted jpegs, gifs and pngs, I had never noticed that there was another option there for saving as SVG.

Select the SVG option in Illustrator's "Save for Web" screen, and the result is a streamlined SVG file that even beats Inkscape. In my test, the same graphic was saved as 2.3K and only 58 lines of code.

Conclusions: As long as you use the "Save for Web" option, both Illustrator and Inkscape do an excellent job of creating lean, developer-friendly SVG files, with a slight edge going to Illustrator. That being said, if creating SVGs is the main thing you're looking for in a vector art program, the difference isn't worth Illustrator's $599 price tag. Save your money and download Inkscape.

	File Size	Lines of code
Illustrator SVG	473K	12,512
Inkscape SVG	3K	89
Illustrator "Save for Web" SVG	2.3K	58

 

Ask any group of developers, designers, project managers, and executives to articulate what Web 2.0 is, and you're likely to get as many different answers as there are people. Don't count on getting a more consistent definition from the online authorities either.  Here are some examples of how different people define it:

The surface-skimmers: These non-techies know it when they see it. If the site has rounded corners, windows with gradient backgrounds, a tag cloud, and 3-D "bubbly" icons, it's Web 2.0.

The Gmail junkies: This group sees Web 2.0 as the ability for web apps to use features traditionally reserved for thick-client applications, like pioneer Gmail. For them, Web 2.0 is all about using Ajax, Ruby and other technologies to offer a better user experience.

The kitchen sink crowd: For this group, Web 2.0 includes a little bit of everything. One rather authoritative-sounding article from O'Reilly seems to throw in nearly every recent trend they could think of as part of Web 2.0: the Web as a platform, relying on collective intelligence, data-centric applications, continuous improvement of software, trusting users as co-developers, the use of lightweight programming methods, software that works on multiple devices, and rich user experiences. For good measure, they even mention The Long Tail.

Wikipedia: The typically accurate and concise Wikipedia surprised me with what seemed like an off-target definition in their Web 2.0 entry:

Google: Google Definitions was a little bit clearer:

The term-coiner: I went back to the source, the guy who coined the phrase "Web 2.0," Tim O'Reilly. On his December 2006 blog. Tim refined his definition of Web 2.0:

No wonder people like me are scratching our heads when our bosses and clients tell us they want something to be a bit more "Web 2.0-ish." Can we all agree on a definition, or should we just stop using the term before we lose our collectively-intelligent minds?

The clarity-loving communicator in me casts this vote. I say we stop using the term Web 2.0 until we can agree on a less ambiguous definition.

In the meantime, I have some bubbly icons to create.