I’m reviving/salvaging an old project I built for an employer about five years ago, and was allowed to open source.

The specific usage of the project was a bit specific to that employer, but it had some really cool concept that can still be very useful in the area of network automation, so I started this weekend trying to salvage the parts. Working with five years old code is a bit challenging - not all components are backwards-compatible I found out.

For the interested, it was written in ruby, with Sinatra as the microframework behind.

That website is a goldmine.

I-Net surveys overwhelming support the notion that net-sters cherish their privacy. For the curious, it is easy to see what kind of ‘information footprints’ you leave behind at a website after a visit. Try this. Visit the Anonymizer website. Click on: “You don’t have to tell us, we already know all about YOU.” Within just a few seconds, you will be able to see what a webmaster can learn about you. Typically, it will display your operating system, (Windows 3.X, Windows 95, and others), your browser type (Netscape, MS Internet Explorer, or Mosaic), your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and may indicate the site of your previous visit. Maybe more. It’s a bit scary.

Can we go back to the time when this was what people considered too much info?

I applaud the initiative to delete your facebook profile, but looking at myself, I’ve come to realise that I’m hopelessly depending on it.

I’m depending on it for a number of reasons, primarily because I’m a foreign national living abroad and my entire network back home can be interacted with primarily by facebook. If I suddenly left facebook, I would be even more separate from the people I know and care about and a great deal of my network.

I am part of a lot of groups that coordinate activities I take part in. I get invited to events that I make the appropriate travel arrangements for in good time, so I keep contact with friends and families.

If I were to leave facebook, I would hope they would send me an email once in a while with an invitation or an update on their life, but that just won’t happen I’m pretty certain.

The only social network that ever came close of being able to replace facebook was Google+, and we all know how that went - it seems mostly kept up so Linus Torvalds can rant there - and speaking of alternatives, I remember how long it took for all my friends to come on facebook, any potential alternative out there is going to be a half-barren wasteland for any foreseeable future.

There are a few reasons for me clinging to MacOS for work (I’m a network engineer, and I code a bit too). The overshadowing first reason is called Microsoft Office. I wish I didn’t have to use it, but I have so far not been able to properly dodge it and my current employer is entangled beyond belief in the whole Microsoft ecosystem with OneDrive, Teams, Yammer, OneNote et. al. that I’m aware of nice cross-platform replacements for, but stuck with.

Similarly, I’m depending on OmniGraffle to display and create visio (compatible) drawings.

So why not just run Windows? Well, I had a go at that although not by personal choice when I started my current employment half a year ago, where I was handed a mediocre HP laptop while waiting for my Macbook Pro to be available, and it was quite terrible to work with. It became bearable when I had my emacs setup tuned, and I could sort of live inside emacs, but it was a poor substitute for the terminals and unix tools I’ve come to depend on.

Another reason, and that may just me being scared from previous experience running Linux for work, and that’s the whole multiple display thing. I have multiple displays at my home office at different rotations, and a widescreen monitor at work. Switching between multiple displays was never painless when I ran Linux, but that may have improved since then Still the point about different DPIs have been raised elsewhere here, so I believe it at least partly still applies.

And then there’s stability. It is entirely possible to have a stable Linux environment, but not perpetually. Something will break between releases and you’re forced to tinker and be unproductive. I enjoyed that part when I was younger, and I still do for my hobby systems. But for work, I just want things to work.

Slack seems the favorite of the current times, and it seems to be usable by non-technical people as well.

Org-mode is amazing, but not only for the markup structure.

The built-in functions in emacs relating to org-mode makes it all so powerful, and they are too many to even start mentioning.

However, one thing that I recently discovered that made org-mode even better for me was that Pandoc now has org-mode support, so it is now possible to turn org-mode in to basically any format, including Microsoft Word format, which is a killer feature if you’re forced to live in a Microsoft Office corporate environment.

This is great news for me. The command line tool has been the only thing that has kept me with lastpass.

So, there’s a lot about scale to be said when talking about network diagrams. It might be relatively trivial to generate something that can be mapped out with dot/graphviz if your scale is small - like a local network, or if your detail granularity is low - like only the actual lines between elements, the logical links between routers.

However, if your purpose is proper documentation, it will be non-trivial, and I have yet to see proper auto-generated diagrams that can also be viewed as proper documentation that reads intuitively.

I prefer omnigraffle on Mac to draw my diagrams, but it has become a lot less about the tools for me, and a lot more about how you draw. Good network diagramming is an skill that has to be learned, I believe. It has a lot to do with learning how to draw complex topologies in a readable fashion, how to order elements on the canvas and all that.

I would advise you to find a tool that you believe have the features you require, and then train yourself by only focusing on the things that you draw on the diagram, and how they are presented.

I ran Linux on my desktop for years, but had to use a remote windows desktop for all the office stuff that I unfortunately have to use in my corporate career. Mac OS X was a savior in that regard, as it allowed me to run microsoft office, alongside a good terminal, emacs and all the other unix tools I have come to rely on.

Until I can run the office suite on a Linux or BSD, I am stuck on MacOS.