Last year I properly attended my first Open Source Developers Conference, and this year's - held in Brisbane from November 26 to 29 - is coming up fast.I'm planning to attend again this year and if you have any developers doing open source work or doing any open source work yourself, I can heartily recommend going. OSDC is a great place to pick up tick and trips and find out how to use your favourite tools and languages in unexpected new ways.
With hard disks getting larger by the month, keeping all your data backed up can be tricky. Raid will give you reliability, but no possibility of taking your data off-site, and tape drives are expensive.
I found myself needing to keep backups of an 80GB raid array for a small office server, and recalled an article I had read a few months ago in Linux Journal. The article details how you can keep snapshot backups of thumb drives on your harddisk... and that made me think doing the reverse should be workable too.
As we were going through our web server logs this morning, looking for 404 - page not found errors, it turns out quite a few people have linked to documents in the /osia and /osv directories on our old website.
These directories don't live in the same location on our new website. To keep things tidy we moved them into a directory called /files. So when we switched over, all those links were broken. Of course we can copy the documents back to where they were, but there is something to be said for keeping the web site tidy.
Good news for those of you exchanging documents with users of MS Office 2003:
"The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 that allows users of Microsoft Word 2003 to read, edit and save to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now available."
Download it for free from http://www.sun.com/software/star/openoffice/index.xml
The day before yesterday I rceived a call from a client who wanted to know how to install additional dictionaries into OpenOffice.org (on Windows).
I had no idea, so I went exploring the menus and found an Install New Dictionary option hiding under the File>Wizard menu, but it wasn't quite that straightforward after all...
There is an article by Adam Turner about OpenOffice.org and Open Document Format in the Next section of The Age today. Turner speaks with Bill Turner from De Bortoli Wines, Mike Carden from the National Archives or Australia and our own Donna Benjamin.
After much deliberation, today we've decided to go with Drupal as our preferred CMS solution. So, of course the first thing to do is move our own site to it. As an added bonus, this means we'll both become proficient at customising, and be able to offer additional services to clients.