evought

I have had intermittent problems with Xisto today as well, but I have had trouble with a handful of other servers too, so it may be a NAP having trouble. I can access your subdomain with no problems.

The source code is, of course, open to all comers, but be warned- it's huge. There is not going to be a lot that you can go in and change easily that is not already an option somewhere, either in the preferences or the config. The source code has improved a good bit (in quality: organization, naming conventions, etc.) since its Netscape days, but there is still a fair learning curve. I have not made changes to it in a while but I have used it as a teaching tool before. It is an excellent example of a complex real-world application that students can take apart. It also demonstrates good practices and some very bad. The latter mostly seem to be leftovers from earlier days but there is a lot of it. In particular, the Firefox codebase is a very good demonstration of portable programming, both just how hideous some of the code has to be to deal with OS bugs and non-standard system libraries and how well Firefox does handle it. If you do want to invest the time, the project welcomes volunteers and you will learn a good deal.

Hawkings, in his book, _A Brief History of Time_ suggests that the Big Bang and the idea of expansion is just an artifact of how we see time. If you think in four dimesnions instead of two, and picture space/time as a big ball, then the pole of the ball is the "Big Bang". As you move toward the equator, with each slice o the ball representing an instant in time, you see the universe "expand". When you reach the equator, that is the "Little Whimper", from our point of view, the end of time. Why doesn't the universe contract ater you pass the equator? As the universe expands, the amount of entropy or chaos also increases (2nd law of thermodynamics). When the universe contracts again after the half-way point, chaos/entropy decrease and the 2nd law of thermodynamics seems to go the other way. Our minds depend on the second law's direction to store information. When our brains store data, we create local order at the cost of more global disorder- entropy increases. Our minds can therefore only function when the 2nd law points to increasing disorder. Therefore, after the universe hits the halfway point, time flows backwards for us and we again *experience* it as Big Bang leading to Little Whimper. For the most part, it seems that the universe does not really care about our concepts of space and time. There is a structure there and we try to understand it by talking about space and time, but the universe does not seem to really be structured that way. That is why physicists these days talk about space-like and time-like measurements. Penrose also heavily advocates the idea that much of the structure of space-time is created by our experience of the universe, rather than what is actually there. Our minds cannot understand certain structures and therefore we do not experience them.

Flash memory is not necessarily hard to spoil. Flash is only good for a certain number of writes. If you change out your music on a regular basis, you will wear it out, especially if you ever use it as a portable hard drive. On the other hand, you will not damage Flash memory by joggling it. I have a decent flash MP3 player sitting here that I have worn out the memory. It still plays, but I cannot write to it anymore. If you do any sort of exercise while carrying your player, go with the flash memory. If you just carry it around, ride the bus, do other light activities, you won't hurt the hard drive and it will last longer. Personally, I don't care about a color screen. I want to listen to music, not look at the screen. The screen needs to be clear enough to see what I have playing and select songs. But that's just me.

For a box like that, Fedora Core 4 or Debian will work fine if you do not install packages you don't need. Your big problem will be RAM, not CPU. Consider not installing X-Windows at all. For a server, you just don't need it. Do your administration from another box, put your server under a desk or in a closet and forget about it. I have run a dozen web and FTP sites off a box no bigger. If you *really* want to do administration from the box itself and really want a GUI, try either BlackBox or, as another poster suggests, WindowMaker. If you like Mac OS, you will like WindowMaker. It is reasonably fast and lean, pretty, and has what you need. Turn off some of the eye candy in your preferences (opaque move windows, "superfluous animations", etc.) if it feels slow, but this will be more due to video card than CPU. BlackBox is *very* spare, giving you some outlined window frames and a menu for launching applications, but it gets the job done. I have used a box with the same amount of RAM to do serious development before. With WindowMaker or BlackBox and emacs, you have enough RAM left over to have decent page cache and the box will actually perform quite well. My drive light came on when I logged in, loaded my editor and did my first compile and then stayed off for the rest of the day since everything was in RAM. Linux does very well now with keeping temporary files off the hard disk and not slowing your system down.The bottom line is that with a (relatively) slower processor, you want the CPU to be able to be busy all the time. When it has to stop for disk access or swapping, it won't catch back up. A fast CPU can spend 9/10s of a second waiting for a drive access and still respond to the user in under a second. A slow processor needs the whole second for processing and needs to be able to get data from RAM to feel responsive. Linux will pre-emptively swap unused data to free up space and do a good job if you give it some room to work with.If you find that you seem to be swapping (little free RAM, not much of a cache), run 'top' and have a look at your processes. See what is eating up your memory and get rid of it. You should be able to get your base system with X-Windows running down to about 20-22 MB of RAM, leaving you about the same to run a few applications and about 70-80 MB for cache. Most web browsers will drag your box down into the depths of harddrive thrashing. Various versions of Mozilla seem to take over 30 MB just to load. I use 'links' or 'lynx' on boxes with low amounts of RAM. They are command-line browsers with some color and even limited frames support.As or serving files, I have saturated a 100MB ethernet with a dual P-90 file server (with SCSI RAID) running linux. You have more than enough power to serve files as fast as the network can take them and modern IDE drives will outperorm the ancient RAID system I was using.BTW: Put your swap partition on your fastest drive (lowest seek time) or put a swap partition on each. It may make a difference.

OpenOffice and StarOffice have a database component. I have not used the database component myself, mainly the word processor and spreadsheet, but it is there and other people have found it useful. It has its own built-in mini-database system and can also access other products via SQL. PgAccess is a TCL/Tk based system for administering Postgress database systems. It has support for creating tables, making queries, and the other basic functions you will need. I remeber it being a little stark and a bit tough to set up when I last used it, but it was over two years ago and it did the job. I have also used the database component of the Applix word processor suite but it does not look like it is sold anymore. Hope this helps. P.S.: As a free bit of advice (its worth what you pay for it), start getting your feet wet with the command-line tools a little at a time. In particular, use the GUI tools as learning aids. Look at the queries and commands they build and start figuring out how they work. The command-line tools are always the most flexible and reliable. When things go wrong, they are the most likely to continue working. They also let you automate tasks by executing saved scripts. GUI tools are great for visualizing your data and seeing the structure, but the command-line tools have their place as well.

As I am setting up my site, I am looking for two things, one is a set of icons to display in the footer with links to the various technologies and vendors I use, the other is a set of rotating banner ads for sites or services I think really deserve more attention (I am not collecting money for the ads).Does Xisto have a recommended click-through icon for footers and/or a banner or us to display on our sites? Where can I find it?

My first experience with Mambo was incredibly frustrating, but I may at least know why. There are problems with Mambo and several Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) browsers. Specifically, I ran into it with Safari 2.x not activating the Save button when submitting content. After completing your post, the Save button does not work and you end up hitting Cancel and throwing the post away. Under Firefox 1.0.7, the Save button works for me and content is updated, but the browser will often freeze and have to be closed. It looks like other people are having this issue with varying symptoms. It has appeared at least once on a PC, and it may have something to do with ISP network configurations interacting with Mac OS X. One possible solution is posted on the Mambo Forum (see Keithorama's post (#10) near the bottom), which I have not yet tried. I will post again when I have more results.

1) I have no problem putting an ad for Xisto on my site; you folks provide a useful service and deserve to get business. I am in the habit of putting banners or icons for my vendors on a site. I would prefer not to be forced to. I would also prefer not to be forced to put rotating ads on my site without being able to select them myself. I have no idea that Xisto's advertising customers will be appropriate for my readers. I, say, I could select advertisers in exchange or hosting credits, that might be OK. 2) At the moment, I would not use the option. I am disabled and want a buffer for when I get sick, etc., but your posting requirements are so low (1 credit per day) that I should be able to build up a reserve of credits without any difficulty. 3) I have no problem with the posting-based system and the number of posts required is quite reasonable. If I did not want to be required to post, I would not have signed up. 4) I suppose a clip-art library might be useful for people to get their sites rolling. It would save you storage since the graphics would be in a shared deirectory. Many small site operators do not have access to basic graphics for their initial content. I produce much of my own artwork, but it takes time to get everything together that I need. For that matter, I would have no trouble donating artwork a little at a time; I have released images under Creative Commons before. You could just create a common repository for members to share art, possibly in exchange for hosting credits, possibly not. For my part, I would not want to assign copyright, but would have no problem with CC or other shared-licenses. The repository might be an additional draw for advertising click-throughs. I am used to ssh access to perform certain tasks much more efficiently. For instance, uploading a zip file and unpacking it in the right place is much faster and more efficient through a shell. In general, shell activities take less bandwidth and CPU for routine site maintenance. If you could provide a secure (and probably restricted) shell I would use that in preference to the GUI file manager. FTP does not make it easy to move, rename, or decompress files or other routine tasks. One ends up copying or doing multiple uploads much more than seems necessary. I understand that this is a security issue, but FTP has its own security problems. Sites like SourceForge do a good job of restricting the shell for security but leaving it useful. Some decent junk mail filtering would be useful. I know that SPAM/viruses can eat up bandwidth quickly, only some of which is accounted for in BW quotas. The last virtual hosting site I ran, SPAM accounted for almost half of the monthly bandwidth. Automated greylisting works very well without having to provide much control to the site owner or burn CPU cycles. I have seen it cut SPAM by over 90% with no user intervention, no false positives, and reduced CPU usage in the mail server. SPF is also a very safe way to reduce illigitimate traffic. You can provide a little bit of help to users (some links and canned MX records) to set this up. I would be happy to do a HOW-TO in a bit. 5) I do not require Cpanel and would be fine with one of the free alternatives such as webmin/virtualmin. I have used Webmin extensively before. 6) If you mean, would giving up Cpanel in exchange for more BW and space be worthwhile, then "yes" certainly, as long as another means is given for configuration (e.g. Virtualmin). Other comments: I got here by seeing consistently high ratings on review sites. Xisto has a good reputation throughout the community. Show off your member sites. A rotating ad with a blurb about a member site would be very nice. It might be much easier to convince your members to run ads for you if this is done. As for SPAM and useless posts, try a more visible moderation system. Look at the way it is done on Slashdot or Slashdot-derived sites. Give your moderators some standard buttons to subtract points for various reasons and have those reasons show up in a log and in the post. That way, the user gets feedback about why they were docked and a new member looking at the forum has a yardstick. In the end, you cannot do anything about the blatant abuses, other than ban them, but the majorty will start to improve in order to improve their credit. You do not provide enough to buy with hosting credits (that I can see). Ater getting your hosting packages, 1 credit per day is very easy to maintain. there is no reason to keep improving posts. The ability to trade points which you just added is a start, but think about giving the member other useful things to buy which do not necessarily cost you cash, such as letting them spend credits to advertise their own site somewhere in the Xisto pages. Also consider Slashdot's practice of giving long-standing and active users moderator points at random intervals. That might allow members to participate more and give you a larger pool of volunteers.

I use the Spotlight Search Engine built into Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). It has the advantage of being very quick. Like the old locate tool (somewhat obscure), it worked on a prebuilt index and therefore finds results very quickly. It sorts the results by type and relevance and is very easy to use. It pulls up web pages, email messages, files, entries in my outlining software, MP3s (by searching the ID3 tags) and so forth. One downside so far is that it does not understand meta-data in image files. I have a large number of botanical sketches and I usually put species information and other things in the image comment fields. I would very much like a search for, for instance, "hederacea" to pull up images of Ivy-Leaved Morning Glory (Ipomoea hederacea) for instance, but it does not seem to be able to do that. It does seem to do this somewhat with photos stored in iPhoto, but not bare images. I get around this by putting the sketches in Notebook (Circus and Ponies) with the metadata in the Notebook fields. Spotlight pulls up the Notebook entry with a link to the sketches. The Spotlight search returns results as you type the search text. Sometimes this is convenient, but other times it is distracting. I would like a preference to turn that feature off.

I have a folder ~/public_html/templates/warmish_community.bak which I do not own and do not have permissions to delete. I have copied and renamed the folder contents so that I own and can manipulate the files but cannot delete the original. Please delete this folder for me when you get a chance. This is not time critical. The error was probably caused by a faulty mambo install script. You may want to look into this because it might represent a security hole.

Suggested addition to the FAQ: [Q] : I just got my hosting account activated and now my account is suspended and I have no credits. What happened? A : When your hosting account is activated or you upgrade your account, your credits are zeroed, *no matter how many you have*. As soon as you have enough credits, request your account or upgrade, because you will not keep the extra points. Be sure to be active on the day you receive your account so that you can build your credits back up.

Apparently also: 4) You apply for a host account or upgrade and you get your credits zeroed. This needs to be posted somewhere! I was never worried about being cheated, but mistakes do happen and obviously, people get confused. I would just like better information about what is going on to avoid that. In any case, thank you all for getting it back up. P.S.: Since this a community forum, I will start by posting this information somewhere more visible, but it should probably make it into your TOS.

It is working again, thank you. It does. As I said, though, this *really* needs to go into your docs and be somewhat prominent. The surprise factor is the biggets thing. I would appreciate that. This is my first use of Mambo. I have spent a good bit of time running Zope sites. I am getting very frustrated with Mambo but am nearly certain I am just not doing things correctly. Just doing simple things like getting my own logo and name on the masthead (still have not gotten a logo up) has been "interesting". Still, it seems to be a good product and I see other sites using it well, so I suspect I need to just grit my teeth and get through the learning curve. Feel free to send me a personal message with any tips or advice.

As another poster siad, despite the fact that rodneyley was overly rude and quite possibly plageurizing (sp?), he *does* have a valid point (A stopped clock ... ). There should be a simple log of changes to the credit amounts. I am currently dealing with a situation where my credits have changed suddenly and made my site inaccessible. I have no idea why and I cannot fix it. I do not see any posts which have been replied to by moderators and adjusted down; I have the email option checked, so one would think that would have told me. There is no easy way I am aware of for a user to find out. The moderator made several statements which are troubling, not because they indicate anything shady going on but just because they are optimistic to the point of insanity. I have been a (good) programmer most of my life. I am a careful programmer with unit tests and documentation and peer code reviews and acceptance tests. My code has bugs. Everybody's code has bugs. If that Jewish carpenter had been a programmer instead, the world *might* have seen some bug free code. Computers *often* do things mysteriously either because the programmer or the user (or both) do not quite understand what the computer has been instructed to do or all the forces in play. A user-visible audit trail makes finding glitches easier. Further, the moderation system has humans-in-the-loop. Humans make mistakes and it is not a big deal. Maybe the wrong post is sometimes selected. Maybe a similarity is accidental or maybe the external post is a copy. (Doesn't seem to have happened here- I looked at the post in question, but I have seen it happen with other systems). A simple audit trail will make arguments easier to resolve because at least everyone will be discussing the same thing. In my current case, as stated, I have no idea what the issue is at all and have not been told. A moderator should not have to dig back through logs to find this out- their time is better spent. It should be recorded in the first place. Having done moderation of various kinds, the act of examining the post and deciding is the biggest effort. Typing a short comment to go in a log which gets displayed to the user should not be a big deal. *Really bad support attitude*, regardless of what the user has done. The small glitches are usually 90% of the support load in any installed system. A small glitch disables a site just as effectively and the user is just as inconvenienced. If Xisto does not have the resources to deal with the problems than they do not have enough resources to offer the service they agreed to provide. The admin post strikes me as a "Your problem does not exist because I do not have time for it." Additionally, as noted above, moderators would not have to search for the answer if there were a visible, auditable log. If points are not randomly deleted, then *someone* made the change. That someone knows what the problem is and can record it. It is then a very simple matter and does not have to involve an admin at all. You will have empowered the user *to solve their own problem*. :-) For most situations, these log entries can be canned or almost canned. I know mistakes happen on Xisto for the simple reason that they happen everywhere. Keep a visible log of some kind, either a list of all the user's posts where they can see any moderation changes (ala Slashdot) or a journal of credit changes, like a bank statement. You do not take money (that is, cash) at Xisto for the free site, but, as you say yourself, you do it for economic reasons and are "paid" for the effort. For your own sanity and that of the user, display regular account statements. At the very least you will spend a little less time dealing with cranky users.

Err... no, I don't understand. Do you mean "If I upgrade to the next level of hosting, the credits removed when I had my host application accepted will be added back in?" I had intended to submit an application for an upgrade today after posting some more, but now I no longer have the credits to do so. Further, I am now up to over (+)7 credits and my site is still suspended. The message said I would only need 3 credits for the site to be reactivated. I think what is really needed is a good solid explanation of how putting in a hosting application and upgrading affects your credits, something like the pinned post in the Announcements board. In the meantime, I am still at a loss as to how to get my account reactivated, or whether to even bother. If the rules are not clear and I have to go through this kind of thing on a regular basis, it is not worthwhile and I need to go elsewhere. I rather like the concept of Xisto. I have spent many, many hours over time answering peoples questions online and it is nice to be able to get something back for it. I think the big problem is that the rules are just not comprehensible and, from other posts, I am not the first person to be confused. The biggest thing that makes me angry here is the surprise factor. I put in effort, followed the posted rules, ended up being penalized, put in more effort and still do not have a working site. I am making good posts and generating conversation. This generates traffic for you. My customers cannot get to my site and see a message which makes it look like I am insolvent or have bad credit. What do I need to do from here?

Hmmm... better than that, it looks like MPlayer now has a Mac OS X package and binaries for Tiger, so I don't even need to play around with the library. It looks like it will work about the same as VLC. I will have to try it and see which i like better. It looks like either way I can use the same media/DVD player on my Mac and my Linux box. Thanks.

Well, looking at http://www.cheatbook.de/, which I assume is what you are asking about, it is just an indexed set of simple web pages. i would recommend a hierarchical notebook program, like Circus and Ponies Notebook. It is a Mac program, but I have seen PC equivalents. It will allow you to collect information and will automatically build table of contents, index, search, and generate web pages or PDFs from it if desired. It cost $30, I believe, but is well worth the price (you can get a 30 day demo). I have been using it for years for similar tasks. An actual database application seems like severe overkill for a desktop cheat manager.

First let me say that I am upset at the moment, so if this comes across that way, do not take it personally. This may be a simple mistake somewhere, but I am very confused and frustrated. I found this site, built up about 20 credits, and applied for a basic site (cost, 10 credits). Over the couple days it took the site to be approved, I continued posting and got up to somewhere over 30. The account was approved, I spent the weekend at a local festival (what I do for a living) which tied me up for 48 hours. I get back, and my new site, which I have printed on the business cards I handed out at the fair, is *down*. Apparently, because I am at a negative credit balance. Now, the explanation of the credit system in the announcement forum says: Therefore, I would expact to have over 18 credits left (minus 10 for the hosting package, minus 2 for the 48 hour absence or maybe 3 depending on exactly when it was charged). Instead I have about (-)5. Further, on the message that says my site has been suspended, I find this: Even if it is not exactly one point per day, I definitely had more than 10 points and should have been able to miss *one weekend* without going negative and *being suspended*. I have *no problem* posting and being active on this site and no problem building up credits that I do not even need. However, I am *disabled* and am selling crafts to support myself. I need to be able to be inactive for short periods and followed the rules for taking care of that. Now my site is down. I saw another post on this forum which states that zeroing your account is standard practice after approving a host. If it is standard practice, I do not see it posted anywhere official or in the FAQs, and certainly the above quotes are much more prominent. Second, it still does not bring me down to (-)5. Third, what about the posts I have made after the application was submitted? Fourth, it seems just a bit off the wall if it is a standard practice. So, my question is, what do I do from here? The message says I need to post more to get the site back up. I signed on in the first place to visit the forums and post, but, if my site was suspended by policy and that policy includes arbitrarily subtracting credits with no explanation, I am not sure that I want to bother. Thoughts? Policy explanation?

Oddly enough, he's got it close to right. CFCs, which destroy the ozone layer, are *also* very effective greenhouse gases. It is not just CO2 which traps heat (infrared). Many of the common coolants are even better at trapping heat and harder to get rid of. The CFCs are everywhere in the atmosphere, not just over the poles. The reason the ozone hole is over the poles is because the CFCs destroy ozone faster where there are large amounts of airborne ice crystals. For some reason, the chemical reaction happens faster on the surface of the ice. Yes, greenhouse warming may very well trigger an ice age cooling effect. Not only that, but it can cause severe local cooling in the short term. Some of the winter storms we have had in the past several years may be attributed to this. Although *average* global temperatures are increasing, the overall effect is to make weather more chaotic. Deserts get deluged in rain, places with mild weather suddenly get very cold or very hot because of changing ocean or air currents. One off the big effects we have already seen is the displacement of cold air masses over the poles. The excess heat caused by greenhouse warming pushes cold air away from the poles where it has been stagnant for thousands of years. This cold air rushed down over North America (I don't know that much about European or Asian weather patterns) in the last few years and resulted in the wierd jet streams and freak ice storms. Now that the stock of super-cooled air is about running out, the ice caps and permafrost are melting in earnest. This, in turn, is dumping a huge amount of fresh water into the oceans. No one really knows what effect this will have (other than raising sea level, obviously). The movie, The Day After Tomorrow suggests one possibility. Other than the fact that the movie is a bit sensational, the science is good and is a reasonable possibility, but no one really knows. An interesting tidbit: In The Day After Tomorrow, there is a scene where a student is in a museum looking at an exibit of a mammoth that was found in Alaska frozen in ice. They don't go into a lot of detail in the movie, but I read the original paper from that expedition while I was in college (I have an Ecology degree). They found the mammoth froozen in a block of ice and, initially, figured it had fallen into a crevice in aglacier and gotten trapped. As they examined it, they found two disturbing things: 1) It was frozen perfectly with no freezer burn. In fact, the sled dogs had mammoth steaks for dinner. 2) It had buttercups in its mouth and stomach. #2 means that it was not on a glacier, but quietly eating in a green meadow just before it froze to death. #1 means that it was frozen at a temperature of less than 400 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature required to freeze dry something of that size), getting close to absolute zero. The fact that it did not thaw in the intervening years before the researchers found it means that the local climate was markedly changed at the same time the elephant froze to death. The original paper suggested the possibility of a freak volcanic erruption which released a cloud of pressurized CO2, thus freezing everything nearby solid (CO2 cools as it expands). The dust from the erruption could have cooled the climate for several years. The scenario in The Day After Tomorrow (mega-huricane caused by ocean current-shift pulling down super-cooled air from the stratosphere) is actually more plausible since it better explains the long-term change which would have been necessary to keep the carcass frozen that long. Anyway, bottom line is no one really understands how the climate works and thererfore no one knows exactly what the long term effect will be, but it is not likely to be good for humans.

It does take a good bit of patience. I have made more than my share of shapeless lumps ;-) The nice thing about candles is they recycle easily. The mistakes just go back into the pot to get redipped or repoured. I have a good number of people at craft shows say "Hey, I can do that." and "Aren't you worried that by telling everybody how you do this they will just make their own?" I don't make much that anyone couldn't make in their own kitchens, but most people won't take the time or have the patience to figure it out. What I love is the bit toward the end of the craft shows where the vendors will trade. I'd rather take someone else's things home than my own and there are a good number of things *I* don't have the time or patience to figure and cannot afford to buy with cash. Good woodworking, for instance. I can make tools, clapboards, shakes, racks and shelves, but I don't have the patience or skill for really delicate woodwork. My wife and I just finished making several batches of dipped tapers (beeswax and beeswax/bayberry) for the festival this weekend. It is one of our biggest shows of the year.

One quick tradeoff to keep in mind. Images in files are easier to bookmark and index. Search engines, for instance, like google's picture search, will probably like you better for having normal files with static, unchanging URLs. On the other hand, for some sites, that convenience is not what you want. If, for instance, you are charging per view or otherwise displaying images to particular account holders, or specifically do not want them indexed outside your site, you do *not* want static URLs and can serve BLOBs in response to POST requests. This is not absolutely true; it is possible to set up your database app to serve images from blobs in a way which is search/bookmark/index friendly. It is just harder (no GET or POST requests, permanent URLs, etc). Given an equal amount of effort, file access will be easier.

Hmmm... I did not know it did that. That is definitely a worthwhile feature. I have gotten into the habit with web forms of editting the fields in another editor and pasting the finished text. I have been in too many situations where either the browser or, more often, the remote application bombed out. How in the world does it manage this? The text is typed on the client; as far as I know it is not transmitted until the message is submitted. Is there a Javascript in the background which sends intermediate versions?

I have done very large (400+ pages, dozens of figures), complex documents in LaTeX. Especially for documents with multiple indices and a lot of technical content, there is no beating it. It is also one of the only ways to readily have multiple people working on sections of the same document and sanely track changes and produce integrated drafts. DocBook XML with some good stylesheets comes very close now, but getting (or customizing) decent stylesheets is the difficult part. With either DocBook or LaTeX, you can concentrate on what elements of the document mean and worry about styleing them later. It is much better to see immediately that a certain term is a function reference than that it is italicized. Even careful use of styles in something like Word does not give the author or editor that kind of context as readily and mistakes are caught earlier. LaTeX tends to be more compact than DocBook; the DocBook XML markup can be verbose enough that it hides the text itself. The Lamport books, or, as we always referred to them, the Llama books are a good starting point. Also, get yourself some existing LaTeX documents to look at how other poeple format. I have seen techwriters try to do large multi-user technical documents in Word after saying LaTeX is a "interesting toy" and watch them pull their hair out trying to merge styles, generate and update contents and indices, and generally struggle with things that LaTeX does automatically on every merge and checkout. I you want a GUI work environment, look at Lyx, a document processor which uses LaTeX. I find that Lyx makes it tougher to split documents into multiple iles and leaves the source messier than I would like, but for some people, the fact that it is pretty and has toolbars more than makes up for that. Lyx also lets you select how much of the markup you want to see at a particular time which can help while editting. Personally, I use either a version of Emacs with LaTeX macros or JEdit to edit the source. Most good programming editors let you collapse sections of text or hide certain levels of markup. You may also want to consider a dual monitor setup for any serious markup-based document production. I usually write on one screen and switch between reference materials and document previews on the other. It can almost double productivity and many systems are easy to add dual-screen support. Most Macs can do it out of the box. With PCs you can just throw in a spare PCI card. XP, most Linux flavors and, I believe, Windows 2000 supports dual screens.

I recently learned the process for making hand-made candle wicking from cotton. I am a candle-maker by trade and am slowly getting into making more and more of the ingredients completely from scratch. I have been making hand-made hemp wicking for some time, but hand-made cotton wicking does not burn. Here's why:Traditional candle wick materials, hemp and linen, have a good deal of loft. There are air spaces in the fibers which allow a viscous liquid like molten wax to infiltrate the material and get drawn upward ('wicking'). Cotton fibers, particularly machine spun cotton fibers, are too tight. There are not enough air spaces to draw the wax upwards. The flame runs out of uel, the wick itself burns and chars. Finally, the candle sputters out.Cotton wicking can be made to work if it is treated first. A weak acid is used to dissolve some of the ibers so that the wax can infiltrate the material. Boric acid is normally used or this purpose. Treating cotton is not hard and can be done at home.A boric acid solution can be made in your kitchen by combining salt water with borax (washing soda). Add one tablespoon of each to about a pint of warm water and stir to disolve. Boric acid will form when the salt and borax combines. Put a ball or skein of your wicking material (I use hand-braided perl cotton) in the solution, cap it, and leave it overnight. In the morning, take it out and let it air dry. If you soaked a skein of wicking, you can open up the skein and hang it to dry faster. When dry, drop the ball or skein in molten wax and let sit for several minutes. By pre-soaking the material in wax, your candles will light more easily and burn cleaner.How in the world was this discovered? I am not certain and have not been able to find a lot of information about where cotton wicks were invented, but I suspect, like many advances, it was done by accident. If you wash and soak spun cotton with traditional hand-made (high borax) soap in salt water, the wicking will burn. This was probably discovered on a seacoast and then spread elsewhere.Making candles from scratch is fun and is a bit like magic; families used to make their own lighting supplies in a big batch very year. Going through this process yourself- even once- gives you an appreciation of what life was like as well as an incredible sense of accomplishment.