Thoughts on twitter and blogging

Recently I started using twitter more and more. It took me a while to understand its usage, but today I think of twitter as a very useful tool to quickly communicate and receive news. Instead of blogging about some news I find it much easier (and faster) to tweet them. For example:

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r8 eighth update: http://debian.org/News/2009/20090408 #debian #etch #
Results for #Debian Project Leader 2009 Election: Steve McIntyre was reelected for another year! http://is.gd/s2xV #

could have been the subjects of a new blog post, but now twitter feels much more natural to share such news, that don’t really need a blog post.

Moving forward, I thought that bringing this information from twitter to my blog in a weekly digest blog post would be something cool, and users of my blog not using twitter could find interesting. I setup the wordpress plugin called “Twitter Tools” to do just that. Yesterday the twitter digest post was published and I was looking at it and it was not looking so good; it was just a list of thoughts that were not related, and were either outdated or taken out of some discussion had in real-time on twitter; it was useless…

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Tags: blogging, ramblings, site, twitter

Does Uptime still matter?

When I started working as a sysadmin (about 10 years ago) there was this obsession about uptime. Everyone considered this the greatest sign that you are doing a good job as a sysadmin if you were able ‘to keep the machine running’ for a long time. Looking back, I believe this was mainly because there were not so many systems in place at that time, and everything was in the early days: we were running linux kernel 2.x, we had some ‘fancy’ pentiums as super servers, and were doing fancy bgp exchanges with cisco 3600 routers, and most of our clients were using dial-up lines to connect. Uff… those were fun times Anyway, we didn’t had failover systems implemented, nor did we had fancy monitoring and reporting on all possible things, like we started to implement as business was starting to depend on those systems more and more. During that time, any sysadmin I knew would show how good he was based on the uptime he was able to run one of his ‘core’ servers. When we had to reboot for something (hardware upgrade, or failure, etc.) this was a tragedy as we were losing ‘the uptime’.