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.

Luckily, apache has a module called mod_rewrite, which allows the web master to use regular expression matching on any web request and modify the request as they see fit.

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...