logo_plazes.jpgPlazes rolled out it’s new version yesterday for all it’s users. The update sports a great new UI and some new features, of which I particularly enjoy the groups function.

One downside was the automatic update of the Plazer, which is the program that sends your current location to the site. The new version kept crashing for me and many other Mac users as I found out in the “Mac” group. They fixed the bug now but unfortunately the old version crashes before it even gets to the point of auto update. So you have to download it manually if you want to continue an uninterrupted Plazes experience.

The new Plazer now even features Growl support, which is great because now you’ll get a notification whenever one of your friends chages plaze 🙂

Log4Twitter is very similar to an idea Herbert an me had a couple of years ago, to use a Jabber messaging framework to get distributed logging and alerts from several servers/applications.
It is a Java class that allows you to “log” to Twitter. This would easily allow you to set up an application that sends messages to a private Twitter Account that you can subscribe to. Retrieving those messages should then be possible by IM or even SMS, seems like a perfect set up for me.

Using Log4Twitter is as easy as the following:

Setting Classpath
Add log4twitter-1.0.jar to your application’s classpath.
Note that log4twitter-1.0.jar has to be loaded by the same classloader that will load the logging framework.

Setting Logger
Edit your logging framework’s configuration to enable Log4Twitter.
The fully qualified class name of log4twitter is “log4twitter.FRAMEWORK_NAME.TwitterAppender”.

See the Log4Twitter page for some examples.

Now who’s got the time to code a Linux syslogd replacement or supplement, so I can receive important log messages via Twitter? 🙂