Opinions Change

Opinions do change if you're receptive.

I've been reviewing Norton Internet Security Suite 2006 (which is way too long of a name so I'm now going to refer to it as NIS2006). I used to swear everyone I could convince to run away from this product but I'm going to now reverse my opinion and START recommending it more often.

Now I must qualify this statement: First of all I think that ALL Security Suites suck since they are bloated, memory sucking, bandwidth hogs, but they do serve a purpose for some people. They [security suites] are very broad stroke in their implementation of "Security" and they absolutely dominate your running user and system level processes. You could entirely avoid the majority of the issues that you are being "protected" against by simply being a smart and security-minded computer user. For your average technical user you can avoid almost every major issue that NIS2006 is trying to protect you from if you’re inclined to learn and adapt your computer usage a little, for your average user (read not into security and smart computing) NIS2006 is not a bad choice.

I'm re-reviewing NIS2006 since the previous iterations of NIS* have been know to "break" lots of custom applications including my employers custom web-based applications and it also interferes with Windows File and Printer sharing. These two things tend to generate massive amounts of support calls from our clients. In light of the recent rise and proliferation of script kiddies, Malicious Worm writers, bot nets, etc., more and more of our clients are turning to Security Suites to protect their machines and their networks since they can't afford to hire and retain quality IT staff. This is why I’m re-reviewing this product. I need to be able to stare reality in the face and actually recommend a software package to clients that lack IT knowledge and staff.

I'm pleased to say that the current iteration of NIS2006 with standard install choices and no custom tweaking no longer destroys our Flagship Java based application. In light of that fact and the fact that we really can't teach the world to sing, I'm going to start recommending NIS2006.

Things I still hate about NIS* and other Security Suite products:

• It still sucks massive (88,296 K) memory with just four processes


• It's still expensive. $70 bucks for a one year subscription or $99 for a two year subscription.


• It's still a Symantec Product. Don’t' misread me Symantec's Enterprise products and service are great but your average home user can't afford to pay extra money to call a tech support staff member about a $99 product. It's not right!

Things I like about NIS2006

• The log viewer is rock solid, easy on the eyes, easy to export, print, and save/clear.


• The spam filter is Bayesian based and works really well.


• The install made good choices without forcing me to tweak it to "work" for what I needed.


• It includes an Intrusion Detection component. "Your average user would never even consider the usefulness of IDS".


• If it’s locked down with a username password you can’t easily kill the suite so it’s a decent way of keeping your employees from mucking up the system.


• It has a great port 80 filter for IE.

That's enough about NIS*

I took a day off from work. I don't do that enough. Don't get me wrong I've taken time off for different reasons (mainly errands), but tomorrow is going to be a 90% relax PT day. I have a 2PM appointment with a termite inspector (cross your fingers) but other than that I plan on doing a lot of nothing (outside of making a trip to the DMV).

I'm definitely going to sleep in after getting the kids off to school, and then I'm probably going to get a little CS play in.

Work Stuff.

My current "project" is coming along but it's coming along more slowly then I wanted it to. I still don't spend as much time on my "project" as I'd like to but so many things come up during the day that require my department's attention. Mark and I call this "fire-fighting". We still do way more firefighting then I'd like to do. We also spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with Emails. This probably can't be avoided but you'd be surprised how much work actually consists of pushing digital paper around. (What did people do before email)?

I also attended a short meeting (less than an hour) and got up to speed on a Development project for our web based application. I missed so many of these meetings that I had a lot of catching up to do and I'm real impressed with the work our programmers have done.

It's kind of weird being involved in software development. For a long time you’ve read about the problems with software developers and almost everyone one the public consumer side of the fence says the same thing: "Do more QA and testing", "Stop putting out buggy code and flawed software", "Spend more time on the UI and make it easy to use", etc. Now I'm seeing things from the other side of the fence. Developers slave away in their cubes and keep getting sent back to the drawing board and they want to push what they have out to the public if it works and then deal with rewrites and revisions and enhancements after they get more feedback from the users. I'm still not sure what's best. I think we're approaching it fairly reasonable by doing UI strategic thinking (My department’s job) and quality QA (another person's job). As a young software company we're still learning how to do this right. I think we're approaching it correctly and faithfully on our customers behalf we all just wished that it went faster and that we had more help.

Speaking of help

Off shoring is a dirty work you hear about in IT all the time and my employer is considering it. Whether or not we offshore it doesn't directly affect my position (I'm not a programmer), but it sure can stir the pot. I don't think anyone off shores for quality, but I do believe that it's a fine line between quality and speed to market that leads management to off shoring. I hope it all works out in the end.

I’m out it’s time for bed. (0330 hours).

Posted by Jeff while waiting on his body to get tired.