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Backing up is one of the most important things to be done with a computer. Failure will happen, it is only a question of when, and information loss can be quite painful. Unfortunately the amount of information available now makes it more difficult to effectively manage backups and archives.

Even though my main backup medium of choice (external hard drives) is getting cheaper and bigger about as fast as my information growth, the pipe the information must flow through (USB or FireWire, or DVD for archives) is not keeping up. This makes it slower and more laborious to keep backups up-to-date as more information is added.

If you have a good strategy leave me a comment and let me know what it is, I would love to hear about it. My current strategy is to have a current view and a historical view of important data. I don't backup the OS and installed applications since I always ensure I can rebuild the OS and applications from my install media.

xmlcopyeditor is a free, open-source, simple, and light-weight XML editor with schema and correctness validation capabilities. Unfortunately there is no Fedora package for it yet. Installation is simple once you know how, are willing to ignore the INSTALL file, and fix a simple bug.

First install the dependencies:
sudo yum install wxGTK wxGTK-devel pcre-devel xerces-c xerces-c-devel aspell-devel

Next, fix the /usr/include/wx-2.8/wx/filename.h file (line 393) by changing [0u] to [0] (see bug information here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=295521).

Then download the package from sourceforce (I used version 1.1.0.6): http://xml-copy-editor.sourceforge.net/

Then:

tar xvzf  xmlcopyeditor-1.1.0.6.tar.gz
cd  xmlcopyeditor-1.1.0.6
./configure  --enable-unicode
make 
make install

Now you can run it using the xmlcopyeditor command.

Quite a few ebooks are starting to show up as chm (Microsoft help) files. If you don't use Windows as your main platform that can be a nuisance. Luckily there is a nice simple library to convert chm files to html files under Linux: chmlib. Unfortunately the Fedora packages do not include the example binaries needed to convert the files. To convert these files, download the source chmlib package from http://www.jedrea.com/chmlib/ then

tar xvzf chmlib-0.39.tar.gz 
cd chmlib-0.39
./configure --enable-examples
make
sudo make install
cd src/

then

./extract_chmLib <chmfile> <outdir>

where <chmfile> is the name of the chm file and <outdir> is the name of the folder to put the extracted files. Within the extracted files will be a folder that contains all the html files.

There are several factors that can affect the clock in a guest OS running inside VMware. I was previously aware of a couple that have been (mostly) fixed:

There is a good guide for the conversion of VMware virtual images to VirtualBox vdi files. Theoretically, this should result in machines created using VMware working under VirtualBox. Be forewarned that while the process works (a .vdi is created and appears to be fine) the machine that is created will not actually work, at least under some circumstances (such as my test case using a Windows XP image) since there are incompatibilities in the agp440.sys that prevent the newly created VirtualBox image from actually booting. There is a method to fix the borked virtual machine I have not yet tried but will do so when time permits.