Wednesday 8 February 2012

Availibilty and Common Sense.

Over the last couple of days I've been in some meetings talking about new developments - always exciting. First was a way of better testing and displaying the status of our services (as opposed to systems). We currently have a status page which is excellent and very well used by our staff and students but it's really a list of issues, rather than a list of what's working and what isn't. An interesting new dashboard has been developed, and we're working on appropriate tests now as to whether a service is actually working from a user perspective, rather than whether the server is up and you can log in. Watch this space - availability management is an important part of our service management strategy. 

Currently I'm writing a presentation I'm giving at the JANET conference tomorrow on our move to cloud based services, and the issues around security and privacy and how we've dealt with them. Suspect I'll be putting the finishing touches to it on the train on the way there!

Whilst I'm doing that I'm following the progress of Paul Chamber's appeal at the High Court against his conviction for sending a menacing tweet two years ago. Lots of coverage in the press about it, and I've got the hashtag #twitterjoketrial set up as a search on tweetdeck, and it's beeping so much I've had to turn the sound off my mac. Absolutely ridiculous waste of public money, and huge implications for the use of social media whichever way the verdict goes. Fingers crossed that common sense will prevail, but given the judges' comments when this has been considered previously, I'm not holding my breath. I'm tempted to say that if this goes the wrong way I'll blow Doncaster Airport sky high, but that could get me into a lot of trouble!

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