Dennis O'Reilly, Laurianne McLaughlin

The spotlight just turned up a notch for Vivek Kundra, President Barack Obama's choice for the newly created position of federal CIO for the United States. Kundra had previously been serving as Washington D.C.'s CTO, before being named to the new federal CIO post last week: According to published reports, the FBI raided the Washington, D.C. CTO office Thursday morning as part of a bribery investigation.

The FBI has arrested two staffers in the office on bribery charges.

Talk to IT leaders about cloud computing and two big worries come through loud and clear: security and management. As noted by many respondents to CIO's recent survey of IT leaders on cloud computing, IT departments fear losing too much control over their data and application service levels. Sounds a lot like IT's concerns during the early days of virtualization, doesn't it?

"It's almost a repeat of what we saw with virtualization," says Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic, one of the early entrants in the race to help IT groups manage data and applications residing in the cloud. "Companies are looking for the right on-ramps. Until there are robust management tools, it's going to stay the land of experimentation."

Fortisphere CTO John Suit meets with a lot of companies who are trying to get a better grip on managing virtualization. In the field lately, he sees the results of the virtualization downside that IT leaders have been telling us about for months: VMs roll out awfully quickly. This speed is a blessing and a curse, since each VM you create is another one you must track, manage and secure. Unfortunately, it becomes even more complicated to keep track of VM sprawl and related worries when you start playing with more than one vendor's virtualization technology.

And with Microsoft having released Hyper-V to manufacturing last week and shipping it soon, if at least one person in your IT department isn't playing with Hyper-V yet, just wait. Someone will be soon.

Admit it: You're secretly humiliated by those TV commercials with the two guys pretending to be a Mac and a PC.

Don't let your Mac envy get the better of you; download FlyakiteOSX, which goes beyond skinning to transform your entire XP interface into a near-perfect replica of Mac OS X. FlyakiteOSX converts sounds, cursors, title bars, icons, startup and log-in screens, and more. It even has an OS X-like dock for launching and managing running applications. And it's free!

--Dennis O'Reilly

As the saying goes: Trust your friends, but cut the cards. So even if you trust your auto mechanic, consider using the $90 CarMD to make sure you're not being charged for unnecessary repairs.

Just a little bigger than a standard cell phone, CarMD plugs into the On-Board Diagnostics II port of any 1996 or later model car or truck. (In most vehicles, the OBD II port is under the dashboard.) The unit gave my wife's 2001 Honda Civic the green light just minutes after I unpacked it. The device shows a green check mark if your car passes CarMD's diagnostics, a yellow question mark if it finds a pending problem or inconclusive results, and a red X if the vehicle needs service. CarMD says that a yellow or red light means that a car might fail a state emissions test.

If you're tired of guessing which Alt-Tab window you want to jump to, try this freebie, which presents you with a thumbnail of the selected window, as well as a list of all open windows. You can show your open windows as icons, or as text links. Switching between tasks has never been faster!

--Dennis O'Reilly