My new Dell XPS 400 came with McAfee Security Center. My old home machine runs Norton Internet Security. To be honest, I figured the two would be pretty similar in features so I considered the free Dell McAfee bundle to be a good deal, particularly in light of the generous length of the subscription.

Boy was I wrong. McAfee has been one whipping after another and has, by far, been the biggest “change management” issue for my customers (ie, my wife and kids) with the new machine.

The biggest problem is that there does not seem to be a way to connect a Privacy Service account with a Windows account. On our home machine each of us log in with our own account. That lets me limit the kids’ ability to foul up the system. With Norton Internet Security I was able to tie a Windows account to a maturity level. Norton then made a decent attempt at blocking inappropriate content. With McAfee it isn’t as seamless–anyone wanting to use the net has to log in to McAfee Privacy Service even though they’ve already logged in to their Windows account. The Privacy Service accounts are managed separately from the Windows accounts. That’s shoddy and cumbersome. I’m supposed to ask my four year-old to remember two passwords?

The next annoyance was when McAfee alerted us to a “missing component” and suggested reinstalling. I don’t know why but I let that one slip. The thing that bugged me was the re-install. The product is actually a bundle of four products. When you install them they each need their own re-boot. If you must require a Windows restart, how about giving me the “restart later” option? Four re-starts? Good thing my system boots quickly!

And now for the hat trick. When you ask the McAfee to check for updates it fires up the browser. Unfortunately it doesn’t know how to work with anything other than MSIE. I bought a security product, McAfee! Why would I be running MSIE if I were concerned about security?

McAfee, your ultimate goal in life should be transparency. When your product becomes a pain it will get disabled and ultimately uninstalled. Paricularly when it comes to virus and firewall software, that’s definitely not good for anyone.

Wednesday Navigator was selected as one of the 50 best places to work in Texas by the Best Companies Group (press release). Now that we’re part of Hitachi Consulting part of our job is to take what made Nav such a great place to work and spread it around.

It is hard to believe but the deal is finally done. Today Hitachi Consulting acquired my company, Navigator Systems, Inc.. I believe the press release will go out tomorrow.

We’ve got a lot of details to work through, as you can imagine–Hitachi is nearly 10 times the size of our 100-person firm. But I’m excited about the new possibilities it opens up for my small (but growing!) ECM practice on both the supply-side (access to new resources I can train up on ECM technologies) as well as the demand-side (new markets, geographies, accounts, etc.).

Obviously, I’m focused on adding capability to Hitachi’s existing ECM competency. But the main driver behind the acquisition was that Hitachi was looking to add serious muscle to their existing Business Intelligence(BI)/Corporate Performance Management (CPM) business. Navigator is a leader in that space and we’ve been growing, but now we’ll be able to move forward much more aggressively.

Since I joined Navigator in 1997 we came close to doing a deal a few times and it was always a little nerve-racking. The anticipation builds, major change looms on the horizon, and then nothing. Now we’re here and it is a little surreal. The coming months should be exciting!

My long end-of-year break has come to a close. I’m looking forward to a strong start on 2006. My ECM practice at Navigator continues to gain momentum with some recent internal transfers into my group and a decent approach for external hiring and on-boarding in the first part of the new year.

Over the break we had fun spending time with family. We even managed to slip in a spur-of-the-moment road trip up to Nebraska to surprise Christy’s sister and her family.

I’ve finally started my project to connect my entertainment center with my network. Step one–upgrade the wireless network–is done. I’m loving my Belkin Pre-N MIMO router and PC card. No more slow, spotty wireless for me.

The new Dell XPS box arrives later this week. It’s got a dual tuner TV card in it so we’ll finally be able to join the time-shifter ranks.

The final step is a media extender box so I can stream my videos, pics, and music from the office to the family room. My original plan was to use an XBox 360 but if Microsoft doesn’t get their supply act together I might have to settle for the Linksys. Of course with the Dell’s 20-inch widescreen display I might just forego the family room altogether!

Here’s a random thing that happened to me at KM World. I parked my rental car behind the Hotel St. Claire Tuesday night. I remember where I parked it because I noted to myself it was the exact same spot I had Monday night–a pull-through right next to a light post.

As I was walking to the lot Thursday morning after checking out of the hotel I saw a giant crane in the lot. They were working on the building next to the hotel. As I got closer I noticed that as an apparent safety precaution they had used yellow tape to cordon off a huge section of the lot surrounding the crane including the spot where my rental car was no longer parked. My car was now parked 30 feet away from its original spot, apparently unmolested.

“That’s curious,” I thought, “Who moved my car and how did they do it?” I had not given them the keys and there were no signs of it being dragged or pushed.

So I queried the attendant, to which he responded, “Maybe you left us the keys.”

“Left you the keys? I’m in the car. I have the keys. I didn’t leave you the keys.”

“Maybe you forgot where you parked it,” he proposed.

“I don’t think so, pal.” Was he toying with me or did he really not know?

People who know me will say the forgot-where-you-parked-it theory is the most likely. I’m emphatic, though. In addition to the special note I made about how lucky I was to get the same spot, the large SUV was now backed against a brick wall with little room to spare. Sorry, but I don’t have the skills to back an unfamiliar, borrowed, beast of a vehicle into a spot two inches from a solid wall.

The only possible explanation is that the crew was ready to work and they needed the space. They must have used their giant crane to rearrange the lot. It seems outlandish but I can find no other explanation. If anyone was at the conference and saw a Pontiac Montana flying through the air sometime between Tuesday night and Thursday morning I’d love to know for sure.

If it hadn’t have been a rental I would have started questioning the work crew but there seemed to be no harm done so I paid my fee, shook my head, and drove off.

I recently tweaked the format on my Load Testing WDK Apps with Apache JMeter white paper. When I printed to PDF from Word I got a couple of undeseriable effects. The Navigator logo was jaggy. And my “asides” were in simple, not shadowed, text boxes.

I tried a couple of different quality settings in the PDF options but I didn’t see a difference. Just for fun I decided to import the Word doc into OpenOffice 2.0. Without changing a thing I then immediately did an Export to PDF.

The resulting PDF had none of the problems of the PDF produced from Word using Acrobat. The logo was sharp and the text boxes were shadowed. Plus, I reaped a couple of bonus benefits. In Word, some of my wide screenshots were being cropped and likewise in the resulting PDF. In the OO-generated PDF my screenshots were automatically scaled to fit the page. Another nice bonus was that the PDF was about 1/3rd the size of the PDF produced by Acrobat.

My eternal optimism tells me there are probably config settings in both Word and Acrobat I could tweak that would give me the same results–I just didn’t have time to dig. It was definitely a pleasant surprise.

Tom and I stumbled on to this feature of del.icio.us but we couldn’t figure out how to get to your list of “for” links. Thanks, Jon!

Jon Udell: Semi-private bookmarking in del.icio.us

Macromedia Captivate is a pretty sweet product. I was looking for something to use to create a Flash demo of an application we recently rolled out. I took at look at a free tool called Wink, Camtasia Studio from TechSmith (makers of the SnagIt screen capture software), and Macromedia’s Captivate, formerly known as RoboDemo.

For quickly creating Flash files based on screen activity, Wink is hard to beat, especially for the price (free). Camtasia had a lot to offer but I had read some complaints about crashes and I figured Macromedia’s support for Flash would be more robust. So, I downloaded the 30-day trial from Macromedia’s site and went to work.

What an excellent tool! Creating demos and tutorials is as easy as creating a PowerPoint presentation. Most users will be able to jump right in without cracking open the doc. The nice thing is that it also has the capability to add quizzes and it can report test results to an LMS. So, not only will I be able to use it for demos and tutorials but I’ll be able to create some CBT’s as well.

For the demo, a colleague and I first whiteboarded the entire thing and scripted the application demo segments. Then, she created PowerPoint slides while I captured the app demo. I then imported her PowerPoint file into Captivate, wrapping her slides around the app demo segments. We briefly considered adding a soundtrack but we decided it wouldn’t work well with the interactivity we needed to include. We spent some time fiddling with the transitions, adjusting mouse paths, and adding some branching (so viewers could optionally skip certain segments). Nothing at all in the neighborhood of technical. We wound up with an extremely polished Flash file that can be distributed via CD, standalone executable, web site, or email.

At $500 the tool is the most expensive option of the three I looked at but it seemed well worth it.

Those VMWare guys are geniuses. They are distributing a version of VMWare that can run, but not create, new virtual machines. It’s called the VMWare Player. For my little piece of the world it means my sales organization does not need the full VMWare Workstation product to use my demo virtual machines. And, if the licensing issues for the software installed on the image can be worked out, I can more easily share my images with my clients for proofs-of-concept, demonstrations, trials, etc.

From a much broader perspective it means that VMWare just became a lot more accessible to a lot more people. I predict we’re about to see an explosion of people making their products available ready-to-go VMWare images. There are already some available on the VMWare Technology Network but they are from major players. I’ll bet we’ll see a bunch of LAMP images springing up all over the place as well as those showcasing other open source “platforms”.

What if the VMWare Player becomes as ubiquitous as Acrobat Reader or Flash? I don’t see my parents getting one any time soon but for the technical set, it’s huge.

Of course the problem in all of this is the amount of space a virtual machine image takes. It takes a long time to move and a lot of hard disk to store. When your parent company, EMC, is in to storage in a big way, that last part is probably not a big concern of theirs.

Needless to say, I am excited. Way to go, VMWare!

Google Earth is a huge time sucker but very, very cool. It makes our planet seem enormous and incredibly small at the same time.

I just spent a major chunk of time “flying” all over, placemarking some spots to show the kids in the morning–where I was born, where they were born, the Duck Pond at OU where their Mom and I used to go on dates. They’ll be thrilled.

On thing’s for sure, it definitely makes me want a faster connection and a beefier box!