Over the past week I've been working with colleagues in the Open Source community on drafting a letter to the DPM and Minister for Education calling for greater consideration of Free and Open Source Software in the rollout of the National Secondary Schools Computer Fund.

The letter has been published in full on IDG's techworld site, and syndicated widely through tech news feeds. 

Am just refreshing my references and arguments for open source for education and small business. Stumbled across this paper entitled " Open Access, Open Archives And Open Source in Higher Education"  delivered at the State Library Of New South Wales, in Sydney in 2005 as part of the National Scholarly Communications Forum by Professor John M. Unsworth, of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, USA.

I found myself with some spare time the other day and decided that my current mysql backup strategy is not the best in the world. The mysql server is a virtual machine in a Brisbane datacenter and it's backed up via a script that calls mysqldump on each installed database and dumps the content to (compressed) files. These files then get sucked down to Melbourne via rdiff-backup.

This is fine in principle, but does mean it's possible for me to lose 24 hours worth of data due to an accidental 'DROP table' query.