tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

“Click… click… … click..!”

The sound started to come from the computer closet, and made me nervous. I had this one problem: There are a bunch of disks, of which two are a raid volume for my photos and files, and two scratch disks and such... But I finally found out the sound came from the firewall - my first ever PC. Some of you might remember "fun112" - my first permanent net connection from the dorm, my screamingly fast Pentium 90 that was later overclocked to 100MHz blazing speed...

So that 6GB Deskstar was toast. And having a full linux distro on the firewall/NAT host was kind of silly anyway, so I went looking for a diskless solution. Being an old PC, that box still had a floppy drive. I had used floppyfw at the aviation club, and it worked nicely. This time when looking for the floppyfw download site I also bumped into Coyote Linux floppy firewall and it surprised me pleasantly. It has a web-based admin UI and all, much like many of the ADSL routers out there. Pretty simple and nice to use!

So if you are looking for a simple, cheap router and have a junk PC around, give coyote a try, it made me happy.

Software design..

Luis, yeah. I agree. We should not make the mistake of just listening to the users about what they want. They might have demands, but what is more important is what they need. Those things are not the same, and its important to understand this. It takes good ears and wisdom to separate those two from feedback.

I admire what Apple is doing with their simple, task-based applications. It makes all those features accessible for regular people, without a steep learning curve.