Yes, your FireCard is still useful

First off, I would like to thank everyone who has dropped me a line via email or their BLOG to wish me well. I really do appreciate all the kind words. I especially liked the couple of neat flash-based sentiment cards that were sent. Thanks again.

A few people asked if my new work is an effort to compete with NetMaster. FAR FROM IT. They are actually two separate technologies that can work well together to provide a more defence in depth posture with multiple levels of protection. You need a good perimeter firewall. And Gateway Guardian is great for that. Imagine a VPN client connecting up to a central policy server that determines which rules the perimeter firewall is supposed to run. Think thats impossible? No way... Gateway Guardian rocks in the ability to easily script a way to apply new rules. What I will be able to do is take that one step further. You can VPN into a network only if you are currently running the latest version of anti-virus, have the latest patched Windows operating system and have the windows based firewall running BEFORE Gateway Guardian will open up the IPSec VPN tunnel. This protects BOTH ends of the connection before they can even be established.

And to stop the rumor mill, I did not leave NetMaster to simply let it die. I am still a part of the company there, just not on the payroll day to day. NetMaster has a lot of irons in the fire and is negotiating some great OEM deals. I am still maintaining the master sources and bug fixes will continue to be released as required. So don't worry, your FireCard is still of use to you. (I still can't believe you asked me that :P )

Did my first real excercise routine on Wednesday night. My legs are STILL killing me from the squats. So much so I had to cancel my squash game today as I can barely walk. Its quite comical watching me walk down stairs. Even I have to laugh at myself on that one.

Arcterex threw me a neat link about weight loss. Actually, the whole site is pretty good. There are some featured articles that go into enough depth about cardio, carbs and protein charging. Arc makes some pretty weird protein shakes and now I really get why he is doing that.

Spent the last couple of days pumping out my first draft of my functional design specification that I will actually let other people read. 30 pages of complete and utter joy to write. I love having down on paper everything that has to be done and how to prioritize it. That was something I really missed when working on the stuff at NetMaster. If someone asked me the greatest thing about functional design specs, it would be the ability to control feature creep by really getting down to what is needed, and by when. Next week I have to forward the design to the CSE and arrange for a meeting with one of the experts at IRAP. I love the pace at which things are already moving!

Tonight I am going to relax and my wife and I are talking about going out with some friends to a movie. I guess I should go upstairs and see if that is still on. TTYL