On this episode of The Meat, Tyler demonstrates full system backups using Mac OS X Leopard's built-in Time Machine software. 9 minutes 40 seconds.

On this episode of The Meat, Tyler explains the basics of the Mac OS X filesystem structure and where we'll find our personal files to backup. 4 minutes 37 seconds.

On this episode of The Meat, Robbie explains what swap space is, and why having more RAM makes your computer faster. 1 minute 35 seconds.

On this episode of The Meat, Robbie presents 'cruft', a program designed to clean up your Linux system. To run cruft, type: sudo cruft. 1 minute 41 seconds.

On this episode of The Meat, Robbie expresses a few more good backup practices and tells of some upcoming features as we continue the data backup series. 1 minute 2 seconds.

It's good practice to have more swap space than RAM on your Linux computer. On this episode of The Meat, Robbie gets the inevitable question: what if you upgrade your RAM and it now exceeds your swap partition size? 1 minute 27 seconds.

On this episode of The Meat, Robbie discusses the backward-compatibility of a Blu-ray burner with standard CDs. 51 seconds.

With the addition of FREE POP3 access and SMTP, you can now send and receive Hotmail messages on any POP3 client. To setup you Gmail account to access your Hotmail, just do the following:

1. Login to Gmail.
2. Click settings at the top right.
3. Go to Accounts.
4. Under ‘Get mail from other accounts:’ select ‘add another mail account’.
5. This opens a popup, put in your Hotmail address.
6. For your username and password, put in your Hotmail address\Windows Live ID.
7. Setup the Settings with the following:
   POP3 Server: pop3.live.com
   POP Port: 995
   POP SSL Encryption: Yes (On or Required)

8. If you want SMTP to send from your Hotmail account, add the following for Outgoing Settings:
   SMTP Server: smtp.live.com
   SMTP Port: 25
   Authentication: Yes (On – Use POP username and password or Hotmail credentials)
   TLS or SSL Secure Encrypted Connection: Yes (On or Required)

Note that thiis FREE service is only available in certain countries and is being release worldwide by the end of Q4 2009. If you are not in one of the special countries you can set that up by following a little magic as posted on blog.computerplumber.ca

I wanted to generate a dynamic sitemap on the off-chance it would help with Google results. Static sitemaps are pretty straight forward but if you've got a lot of stuff and they change daily, then hand editing files just won't do it. In that case you need to use a rake task along with cron to regenerate a sitemap. Here's one way you can do that.


In this scenario, I'm assuming you have a bunch of stores and that you want the sitemap to list them all. (You should replace your find statement with whatever you feel is appropriate to your sitemap.)

desc "Generate a sitemap.xml file"
task :generate_sitemap => :environment do |t|
  filename = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/sitemap.xml"
  stores = Store.find(:all)

  File.open(filename, "w") do |file|
    xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:target => file, :indent => 2)
    xml.instruct!
    xml.urlset "xmlns" => "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" do
      for store in stores
        xml.url do
          xml.loc "http://www.buyindie.net/stores/#{store.id}-#{store.name.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]+/i, '-')}"
          xml.lastmod store.updated_at.xmlschema
          xml.changefreq "weekly"
          xml.priority 0.6
        end
      end
    end
  end       
end

Running that file will generate a sitemap.xml file which you can submit to The Google for inclusion. There are other ways to do this though. One criticism about using scripts like this is that if there's an error in the sitemap, it may not be obvious to other programmers where the code that generates the sitemap is.

To address that, one could generate the sitemap in the same way one would generate an RSS feed. Sprinkle in some page caching and expiration and you're on your way to having a sitemap generator that is friendly enough to share with your fellow coders.

Are you looking for good backup software for Linux? On this episode of The Meat, Robbie introduces you to 'Back In Time', an awesome GUI to conduct backups on your Ubuntu Linux desktop which allows you to go back in time through a timeline-style rsync backup. 9 minutes 55 seconds.