Introducing my IT Operations Blog

Since I started preparing for my new business, I’ve had to catch up with all the IT operations technology that’s out there. Especially with technology that comes in form of Free Software. Not that I had lost contact to the systems administration world altogether, but working two levels above the operations staff I didn’t have first-hand experience any more. And, as an IT manager, I actually wasn’t supposed to, anyway.

Now that I’m back at the command line and NOC screen for my own business, I’ve got quite a bit of (re-)learning to do. (That’s a part of what I meant with growth, by the way.) And, as is obviously in my nature, I’d like to share what I learn here. That’s why I’ve started a new blog called “IT Operations Blog“. It’s in German — I’d like to prove the naysayers out there wrong that claim that I’ve lost my mother tongue.

I’d really appreciate it if you’d come around and took a peek. And, if you’d like to further brighten my day, please leave a comment every once in a while or flag some entries that you’ve found worthwhile as a favourite.

Finally, the IT Operations Blog doesn’t have to be a one-man show! Maintaining it in a group surely could be fun! So, if you’d like to join me in writing about systems administration and IT operations topics, give me a shout!

I am a Geek

geek, n.: A person who is interested in technology, especially computing and new media. Geeks are adept with computers, and use the term hacker in a positive way, though not all are hackers themselves. A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who passionately pursues skill and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. (Wikipedia)

Dear fellow geeks, join the Society for Geek Advancement!

Blog Relaunch

All those sick days (of the last three weeks, I’ve spent two in bed) had one advantage: I had time to tackle some things.

One of those things was consolidating my old Serendipity blog and the current one, running on Drupal, into one Wordpress blog. I wanted to switch from Drupal to Wordpress because WP is more focused on blogging and there are some features (e.g. trackbacks, remote blogging via XML-RPC) that Drupal doesn’t do as well.

It took me about 12 hours of Perl hacking to write a converter that reads posts and comments from a source database (Drupal or S9Y) and writes them into a destination database (WP). So, all posts since 2004 including their comments should have made their way into the new blog!

Let’s see if the new possibilities help me in writing posts in shorter intervals. Of course, that’s what I’ve been telling myself for weeks now.

I just started my first tumblelog

From time to time, there are some random things I’d like to point my friends to. So far, I’ve either posted them on Twitter or in a short entry on my blog here.

A few days ago, I took a look at Tumblr and decided to start my own seperate tumblelog. That way, I can focus my blog here on the more elaborate entries.

So, if you’re so inclined, take a look and subscribe to the feed of Associative Disarray. It should be fun!