What I've long suspected turns out to be true; you can spend less money on hardware as well when using open source software. Double the savings! Don't believe me? The IT manager at Westall Secondary College (where I occasionally help out) has said just that in an article called "Ubuntu breathes new life into school's abandoned hardware".

Because we get a plug, I suppose I should explain a bit about the work I've done at the school :-)

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.

The theme for this year's conference is "Success in Development & Business".

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.