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 They're getting by now with Excel spreadsheets, outdated Access databases, filing cabinets, and whatever info they can remember in their heads.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.

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
   

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.