Play on Works

Work is a contact between you and someone else guaranteeing your compliance in an unsatisfying activity for an agreed upon price. Fun is an agreement with yourself or others to do something for which no monetary compensation is required to asuage dissatisfaction. Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy everything else.

Multi-day Marathon Mayhem

With no rest days:

1 mile/day for 26 days = Started 6 July,
2 miles/day for 13 days
3 miles/day for 9 days
4 miles/day for 7 days
5 miles/day for 5 days
7 miles/day for 4 days
9 miles/day for 3 days
13 miles/day for 2 days
26.2 miles/day for 1 day = Ended 13 September!

Notepad++ Git Integration**

I've been trying to get Git integration in Notepad++ with a plugin for some time now. I came up with a project based on someone else's attempt at converting an SVN plugin to Git. It works, but certainly not ideal. It basically provides buttons to call command lines of Git for Windows, which I always have installed.

I'd heard of Tortoise Git, but didn't want another version of Git installed - but after some research, that's not how it works. In fact, it's exactly what I want!

The Adventures of Rich and Vince

Characters courtesy of SP Studio

Net-SNMP on Windows with SSL

Recently, I found my older Windows version (5.2.2) of the Net-SNMP tools didn't have support for AES privacy protocol for SNMPv3 when I tried to use it. I grabbed the latest pre-compiled Windows binaries (5.6.1.1) from the site and found they didn't have AES support either. After some reading, I found I needed OpenSSL DLLs and old ones at that - version 0.98. This wasn't going to work; I was going to need to compile this myself.

I tried with MinGW included with Strawberry Perl, but 'gmake.exe' kept giving errors. Now I needed Microsoft Visual Studio Community and some help.

Run MAD - one month to go ...

According to the following tweet, on or about 20 July, 2016, I began my run-a-mile-everyday thing with the hashtag #RunMAD - as in - Run Mile-a-Day.

365
∑ (run)^1
t=1
#RunMAD

— Vince (@VinsWorldcom) July 21, 2016

The goal was simple, run at least 1 mile every day for at least 1 year. Some rules:

1. Run at least 1 contiguous non-stop mile every day
2. A day is between 12:00:00a and 11:59:59p
3. No "saving" miles (i.e., 2 miles today doesn't mean 0 miles tomorrow)
4. Do this for at least 1 year from the start date

Unfortunately, I don't quite remember the official "start date" - if I tweeted the day I started or if I made sure I'd stuck with it for at least 1 week or so before posting so boldly. In any case, after 11 or so months with 1 or so left to go, I'm planning on extending to at least Labor Day, 2017 to make sure I've completed a full year. I've done this everyday so far, whats a few more ... ?

Digital Disruption in Service Providers

Every industry can be digitally disrupted - even those that claim to provide the very digital transformation enterprises so desperately seek.

The true benefit of software-defined networking is not separation of control plane and data plane - that doesn't work at scale. It's not easier centralized control and the end of command line with more fancy acronyms like YANG, XML-RPC and REST APIs. The "revolutionary" idea is the separation of the network layer into physical connectivity and logical connectivity. I quote "revolutionary" as tongue-in-cheek - the OSI model always had a separate physical layer and network layer, but in the long move from circuits to fully-managed, bundled MPLS, we seem to have forgotten that.