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I also agree with Twitch. I have been very annoyed of late by posts which I tried to decipher and, in the end, gave up on entirely.Another thing that people seem to forget about is that your posts are editable. I have good grammar and spelling but often have typos slip past me even after I preview. When I see them, I go back and edit them out. Many times I will compose long posts offline anyway and have more opportunities to catch mistakes.No one is perfect, as evidenced by several small typos in this set of posts. I have reviewed pre-publication manuscripts before where the manuscript is combed by a couple dozen reviewers and several editors--- and still small mistakes go all the way to press. On the other hand, the more you make an effort, the less it will impact your posts.Being professional in your posts has another potential side-effect: you can get the attention of potential employers. I have had potential employers or clients do a Google search and read through my posts. I have also been asked to write a book on the basis of forum posts a publication house's editor discovered online (fell through for contractual reasons, but anyway). So, be neat because you are in the public light if for no other reason.

This is part III of a serial publication of my Essay, "Liberty Starts At Home--- Secure People Make Secure Community. In the previous posting, we discussed securing a community water supply. In this posting we discuss issues with communty food supplies and practical programs to overcome them. Food Food security is perhaps the most discussed aspect of this issue. Not only is nutritious food required for bare physical survival, but food has a deep seated cultural importance that reminds us all of where we came from and how we connect to others in our community. With increasing globalization and the disappearance of the local green grocer, many communities are without a local source of fresh food. Many children and even some adults today have no idea what fresh food looks like. They have never seen a farm and perhaps not even a garden. I have met older children who have no idea that beef comes from a cow or that lettuce grows in the ground. We had a teenager visiting us for part of last summer on our Missouri farm who was horrified by what we served for dinner after she had seen it growing. Because these communities are entirely dependent on commercial food, they have no real choice about what they eat and its nutritional value. Many people in urban (and, increasingly rural) communities are dependent on public commodities programs and therefore do not even have the limited freedom of choosing between items on a grocery shelf. Urban areas have approximately one week's food supply if trucking shuts down for any reason, but even rural communities dependent on production contracts are increasingly at risk. It is simply not reasonable that people in the best farming regions in the country need assistance obtaining food! Reverend Thomas Henderson of Tennessee is a champion of Food Security. His programs in Nashville Tennessee and at Camp Dogwood takes inner city adults and children out to the camp to work on a tilled plot. In exchange, they go home with fresh food. The program also involves jumpstarting urban industry based on Food Security. Inner city cottage industry uses the fresh vegetables from the camp and from community gardens to make products like salsa for local and regional sale. Such projects breath life into otherwise economically devestated communities and allows community members to work within the community. Locally, in Mount vernon, Missouri we have a "Grower's" Farmer's Market. You cannot sell at the market unless the majority of your products are grown or made locally. This prevents the wholesale trucking in of cheap food to drown out local producers which happens at many "farmer's markets". The grower's market creates a small pocket of sustainable industry for regional small farms and cottage industry. We ourselves sell handmade soaps, candles, and other items. In a not-so distant past, practically everyone had a small herb garden for fresh herbs. Certain plants like lemon verbena or orange thyme became popular during citrus shortages. Even with a modest ability to grow their own plants on a windowsill, past housewives were able to control some of their expenditures when prices were unreasonable. Programs like the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) are worse than useless and will not protect our food supply. The cost of NAIS alone will drive small farmers, community efforts, and grower's markets out of business. This will result in more industrialization, greater centralization, low genetic diversity and higher vulnerability to disease or attack. In order to secure and protect our food supply, many more programs like Reverend Henderson's and Mount Vernon's must be started nation--- and world ---wide. A local economy based on a grower's market and a community gardening co-op is resistant to transportation shortages and political turmoil. A hundred farmer's markets with individual stalls is more difficult for terrorists to sabotage than an industrial packing plant. Small farms and ranches with high biodiversity and are resistant to diseases. Remember the Irish Potato Famine?

This is a continuation of my essay "Liberty Starts At Home- Secure People Make Secure Communities" which I am publishing serially on this board. The first part described the overall characteristics and components of Secure Community. This part covers challenges to community water supplies and how to overcome them. Water Water is critical to human life. Humans can survive for weeks without food, but only a few days without water. Clean water is also essential. Many people die each year from water contaminated with human waste, animal waste or parasites. A reliable water supply is critical to most human operations, including cooking, washing, growing food and manufacturing. Many communities have access to municipal water supplies. Often, this water is neither clean nor reliable. In the town where I grew up, everyone had to use bottled water during the summer since the pipes running under the river would become contaminated with algea. Even the soda in restaurants had an odor of dirty sneakers. Cities often attempt to compensate by heavily chlorinating the water which may simply exchange one health threat with another. In many urban areas, the municipal water supply is simply stretched beyond capacity. Unchecked urban growth increases demand, adds no new reservoirs and reduces the watershed of existing reservoirs. Bottled water may be no better than the tap water it replaces and in fact may be drawn from the very same tap itself. Dasani water, bottled by Coca-Cola and advertised as "ultra purified", recently had to be recalled from UK shelves because it failed public health standards for bottled water (although it was just within the limits allowed for tap water). The contaminants cited were added by the purification process. The poorer class of society, with limited money and limited transportation may not be able to afford safe bottled water or may have none available for sale nearby. There are additional problems on the other end of the process. Many communities in the U.S. and more worldwide, still do not have adequate treatment facilities for their sewage. Untreated or undertreated sewage contaminates water courses which are then used for swimming, fishing, or irrigation. Health codes in most areas forbid crops grown in septic system leech fields from being used for human consumption, but there are often no requirements that running water courses be tested for contamination. So, how can a community take control of its water supply? One of the most important steps is to push town boards to tie new development to water system capacity. Some counties (Cheetham County, Tennessee among them) now charge "impact fees" for new development to cover the additional load on public services and keep development within manageable limits. This is a good trend and should be encouraged, as long as the money collected goes to its purported purpose. At the family or neighborhood level, people can take steps to supplement their own water supplies as well as recycle some of their own waste. One of the easiest is simply to collect the water which falls on them. Rainwater from rooftops can be directed into a rain barrel or cistern. This water can then be used for watering lawns and gardens during the summer when water is more scarce. It can also be filtered and/or treated in emergencies for washing, cooking, and drinking. Rainwater collection and simple sand/charcoal filtration systems have been used to supply water to farmsteads for centuries. Even if not collecting your own water, having the means to filter or treat your tapwater is also sensible. Home-based filter systems of varying degrees of sophistication are now commonly available and much cheaper than buying bottled water on a regular basis. Solar stills, consisting of black plastic, a pane of glass and some plastic tubing, can be used to distill pure water at very little cost from even the worst sources. Community education on how to collect and treat water is critical. In North Carolina a couple of years ago, flooding caused hog farm waste ponds to overflow and contaminate reservoirs, making half the state's water supply undrinkable. As volunteers mobilized to ship bottled water by the truckload to the disaster zone, it struck me that we were moving water by the ton to a flood zone. How different would the situation have been if a sizable number of homes had been collecting their own rain water and had filtration or distillation equipment available? How much easier would it have been to move treatement equipment to the site instead of water? With governement concerns looming over the security of our water supply, it should be noted that it is much easier to poison one reservoir than thousands of individual cisterns. On the side of waste disposal, grey water systems allow a home to reclaim much of the organic matter in the outgoing water and a good bit of the water itself for watering gardens or crops. Grey water is water from sinks and showers which is not contaminated with human waste. This water, instead of going out to the sewer, can be run through a garden or greenhouse. The plants filter the outgoing water, reclaiming nutrients and reducing impact on the local treatment facilities. Water from toilets continues to go to a sewer or septic system. Black water, or water containing sewage, cannot safely be used to fertilize plants for human consumption, and thus, one must be careful what one grows in the leech field of a sceptic system. It is quite permissible, however, to grow feed for non-food animals or to grow a crop which can be cut, dried, and composted to fertilize other areas. This is normally cheaper than a sophisticated composting toilet system and fits within typical building codes. Urban communities, by and large, can do very little to reclaim their sewage. There is simply no room for sceptic systems in the typical city lot or apartment and major replumbing is likewise not practical. It is usually possible, however, even in mobile homes or small flats, to collect grey water from one or more fixtures, say, the kitchen sink, with minimal fuss and bother. To be continued ...

This is a draft of an essay I am working on which I will publish here serially. Comments and criticisms welcome. Abstract Whether in Iraq, the Bronx, or rural Kentucky, there are inescapable requirements for a community to be secure and productive. Likewise, a community whose basic needs are met can flourish in almost any culture, government, or economy. Globalization, the Internet economy, the threat of terrorism and other issues of the moment do not change the simple rules that have governed us for millenia. We have lost track of this, and, as a result, our communities and the principles we have fought for suffer. Fortunately, here and overseas, the road to a healthy community is not complex; it starts in the local neighborhood and in the home. Introduction Throughout the last several years of rapid political, economic, and ecological change, Food security, both domestic and abroad, has become an increasingly discussed topic. The U.S. Department of State, in the introduction to an issue of Economic Perspectives, defines the term as follows: Concerns over food security are multifaceted and have resulted in many changes and programs: humanitarian aid to third world countries, a revival of community gardens, new registration requirements by the department of Homeland Security, and banning of various agricultural chemicals to name a few. Food security, however, is but a single aspect of a larger, more fundamental, but in some ways simpler issue: a nation cannot be internally secure without first securing the integrity of its constituent communities. A nation cannot be externally secure while it is surrounded by neighbors which are not internally secure. Whenever a community depends on the good will of external power for the basic essentials of life, the seeds of insecurity are sown. Whether that power is a government, a corporation, or a transportation infrastructure, it holds the potential to wield undue power over the local community and the individual. Like Damocles in Greek mythology with the sword of Zeus balanced precariously over his head, neither ill will nor direct coercive action need be assumed; the mere presence of the sword and the imbalance it represents is enough. Insecure communities are unhealthy, irrational, and unproductive: People who feel that they control neither the results of their own industry nor the basic necessities of their lives are desperate people. Free communities, on the other hand, are based on local integrity and the effectiveness of industry. People who feel secure in their ability to carry their own weight and provide for themselves more often will do so. It is therefore necessary that, not only must a community have access to the essentials of life, they must have the means, as much as possible, to provide the essentials for themselves. To that end, a community, in order to be free, secure, and healthy, must have the following characteristics: A community must be secure in its water supply; a secure community has the means to obtain and purify water. A community must be secure in its food supply; a secure community has local access to nutritious food raised in a sustainable manner. A community must be secure in its health; a secure community has access to routine medications, sanitary, hygenic, and cleaning supplies. A community must be secure in its technology; a secure community produces and/or maintains the tools and parts necessary for its day to day operation. A community must be secure in its autonomy; a secure community takes an active part in its own protection and the administration of justice. A community must be secure in its identity; a secure community modifies its own living space to reflect its unique culture and identity. To some extent, the items on this list may be obvious. The items which are not included may be more subtle. Food is listed, but energy is not. A healthy community with access to food, water and tools can obtain its own energy, from its own hands and from the sun if nowhere else. Routine medications are included but doctors are not. A well-nourished and generally healthy community can trade for more advanced medical care or produce its own doctors. If a community is mal-nourished and despondent, no medical intervention is effective. Similarly, the most important aspect of technology is that the local community understand and be able to maintain its own infrastructure. A community which depends on technology it cannot comprehend, create, or maintain in its daily life is on a course for disaster. None of this means that healthy communities are isolationist. On the contrary, insular communities are often insecure in their identity. Rather, relationships with other communities must be consensual, equitable, and reciprocal. Secure and stable relationships rarely exist between groups which are themselves unstable or insecure. Identifying these items is easy; obtaining them somewhat more difficult. Fast food may not be nutritious, but it is more filling than ideals. In this article, we will touch on each of these aspects individually and begin drawing a roadmap for increased self reliance, local integrity, and a return to the individualistic, can-do, cosmopolitan pride which was once the defining feature of this country. Liberty begins at home and so does self-reliance. The steps described here can be begun by anyone, in any neighborhood, in the U.S. or overseas. To be continued...

I like the layout. The composition (placement of photos) is good. Color scheme has good contrast and is visible on my crappy monitor. Site is at least amusing. I don't know whether it is serious or not, but I knew groups in school just like it. Couple problems/comments: 1) "Fc Fosters'" Official Homepage has potential for confusion with "Fosters' Official Homepage," which could get you sued. You need to make it clear that your website is not connected with Foster's itself. You probabl should explain who you are, maybe at the bottom of your opening page. 2) Not clear what to do at opening page. You have several pictures and a title bar which are all individual links. This suggests that they go to different places (they don't) and will confuse the user as to which link to pick. You could make this clear by making the links different and labelling them. This makes it feel less like the first page is a wasted click-through intro which many people do not like. 3) Need more back-end content. Season schedule? Who are the players (/drinkers), etc? 4) Give yourself credit--- add a link to the web designer on the bottom somewhere.

I'm going to give a very solid 'it depends'. As is often the case with stories like this, you do not know what is left out. If the school has a no cell phones policy and they provide an alternative (e.g. the mom can call the school operator and have her son paged), then I do not think there is a problem. Cell phones can be disruptive and, given that the school seres an army base, I can see where his 'excuse' could get old very quickly. On the other hand, given that it does serve an army base, if the school does not have some alternative for "I need to talk to my son and this is the only chance I get," then there is something very, very wrong. Is it just me or is the superintendent's "Oh my God, people are angry and calling us names" rather comical? The fact that they have reduced the suspension from 10 days to 3 tells me that they may not think their policy is very smart.

I have made a couple of credit card purchases through iKobo, mostly to register shareware games. It worked; it was convenient. I don't know that there was anything particularly to recommend it, but there were no problems.

Look at http://www.openoffice.org/xml/xmerge/docbook/. There is a style template for producing DocBook articles in OpenOffice. Why invent when you can borrow? Let folks submit using DocBook (or subset) and use XSLT to convert and post. Myself, I prefer to use a decent text editor, but that is just me.

The graphics are good, but ditto everyone else's comments: font is hard to read. The biggest gripe I usually have with book covers is: Did you READ the book? For instance, in Dan Simmons Hyperion series, The Shrike is a 3 meter tall monster with four arms. Many of the covers have two arms or are clearly much smaller than 9+ feet tall. In Spider Robinson's Calahan books, Calahan's daughter, Mary, is described as a "beautiful sumo wrestler" (the author has a fetish for heavy women) but appears on the covers as relatively slim. Slip-ups like that drive me crazy. So, just make sure you have read it well enough to really portray the characters. Your vision of the details that the book does not say will differ from mine, but what the book does say should match up.

Two more quick things: I updated my Tutorial to use the new tags. One of the main effects is that there are now less abbreviations in my tutorial ;-) Is there a list of the valid BBCodes for this board somewhere? I do not see it in the FAQs, Support, or Announcements.

I appreciate the new tags and you are right: I think they make a difference For more professional articles, a reference/citation tag would be awfully nice. Basically they need to look like this [bLORK06] with a link to the full citation below. It is just an automated interior link with the link id as the abbreviation. With abbreviation or acronym, I can maybe get a bit closer. [bLORK06] "Using Citatations in Xisto Articles". Bobby Blork. Non Existant Publications Weekly. Never-Never-Land. 2006 Also, would it be possible to have an upload feature where we can actually provide a subset of xhtml? It would be easy to check the subset against a DOM for proper use of tags, but the article can then be written offline. You can use a stylesheet to convert it for posting. I usually write mine offline anyway, but I then have it stored in my files in BBCode rather than something more useful. If I have it in xhtml (or heck, DocBook article format), it may be more useful to me down the road. Hmmm... I wonder if I can write a BBCode stylesheet for my DocBook articles...

Well, honestly, the choice just got easier. Get a Mac, and if you really don't like it, run Windows on it using Boot Camp (or send it to me, I need a new one ;-)). There are several reviews out saying that the new Macs are among the fastest Windows machines out there. Myself, I am a Mac and UNIX fan, with Windows being dead last, especially after our ISP just disconnected our account because my wife's Windows 2000 box got a virus. We took the Windows box off the network and put it back on as a Linux (RedHat Fedora 5) box. My wife is now a happy Linux user. With the Macintosh machines you have the most choice, considering you can run OS X, Windows, Linux, or BSD on the same machine. I think that once you use OS X though, you won't look back.

I started out with the WWIV and early telegard systems in the eighties. Telegard, and later Renegade, was an attempt to rewrite and ceanup a lot of the old WWIV code which was extremely buggy and full of backdoors. They were all written in Turbo Pascal. Late Telegard systems were the first to include OOP with the Object Pascal compilers. We connected to the Fidonet backbone for mail and news exchange. Most BBSes had scheduled downtime where they called the next hub in the network. Even with all that, getting news or mail from one end to the other was not long, about as fast or a little faster than the postal system. The beauty of the old Telegard systems is the configurability of the menu system. It was very easy to set up good looking and fast rendering menus, add Doors (exits to external programs like games), and program in upload/dwnload handling (such as scanning, converting, and moving archives). Several of the later systems had what was essentially workflow management where new uploads would go through a series of automatic and manual steps before being published. Archive systems (zip, ARJ, etc.) and serial protocols (e.g. ZModem compression) improved at a fantastic rate and this was a big challenge to get the best compression on slow modems and keep up with the changes in software. I did Pascal (and some assembly) programming for a number of area SysOps in exchange for system privileges. Most of the Pascal work was general cleanup and security fixes. I would just walk through the code, figure out what it was doing, and refactor as I went, encapsulating records in objects, splitting long routines, combining routines which did the same thing. I would also monitor boards to see how people were getting in or get reports from Sysops and try to find the backdoor in the code. Buffer overflows were not common since one of Turbo Pascal's strengths was its length-checked string operations, something that still is not common in C programs. The availability of the Turbo Vision Source code which Borland included with their compiler was a godsend. having two bodies of code, one horribly written, badly commented, and disorganized, and one well-organized, elegant, and well documented gave me guide posts for re-organizing Telegard. It also developed my coding style to be tight, safe, and compact. I think any programmer starting out needs exactly that: a horrible program to maintain and a good program to look at. The assembly work was either performance tuning or, mostly, FOSSIL work. The FOSSIL layer was a set of interrupt handlers and assembly routines to replace DOSes insane and badly broken interrupt routines. FOSSIL drivers were supposed to be easily portable (and in practice were--- the top-level routines and API/ABI could be ported to, say, the Motorola chips without much headache) and *re-entrant*. Re-entrant code was critical to multi-line BBSes. Re-entrant means that more than one process could run interrupt code at the same time. DOS had many different functions all tied into one interrupt and none of them could happen at the same time, say monitoring keyboard states and ansering a modem ring. BBSes were multi-line by running completely different copies of the BBS program and very carefully avoiding executing the same low-level routines --- by blocking until the other was done. Reentrant FOSSIL drivers allowed much finer grained multi-tasking, until, by college, a BBS running under Desqview X could almost be said to be threaded. One of the things I worked on in my pre-college and early college days was squeezing the last bit of BBS performance and efficiency out of the machines of the day. This meant working with overlays (loading and unloading portions of the code to fit in 640K, early on to disk, later to high memory), and a locking memory management model. Before accessing an object, you lock it for use, it is loaded if needed, then when unlocked it can be swapped out following an LRU or pre-emptive swapping model. Most of this work became unnecessary as newer OSes (like OS/2, Desqview X, and Linux: notice I do not mention Windows here) took most of this burden away from the programmer. As 386/486 processors came on the scene, some of the OS load was taken on by the processors MMU, and flat memory models like in OS/2 Warp or Linux eliminated the need to manage your 640K main memory area, far pointers, etc., entirely. By this point, the Internet was popular and the hey days of the BBS (per se) were gone. More people began using email, Usenet news, and the Gopher network (pre-WWW). now, BBSes and blogs are coming back into style as the Internet becomes more community-communication oriented.

This kind of thing would have been extremely handy when I was on the road all of the time. At hotels and client sites I generally had a broadband connection. I also had 3G wireless on the laptop. Being able to access a suite of applications with shared data is something we tried to setup many times at the office with varying degrees of success. Now, I would not use it. My network connection is much too squirrely to have my data on a remote system. I was just without access to my email for three days a week ago. At least, wih IMAP, I have copies of all my existing folders, address book, etc., so I can still access past info even if I cannot receive new mail when the 'net goes down.

That is true, and I have been in favor of the national sales tax. It does not provide as much control over where the money goes as Pohl's idea, but if taxing or spending becomes unreasonable, people can reduce their taxable spending, and country folks like us can almost eliminate it for periods of time as a form of protest.

The 14% Solution is an idea from Frederik Pohl. I think the name is a Sherlock Holmes reference. The basic idea is that taxpayers can opt to pay extra taxes in exchange for more control over the budget.A taxpayer can opt to pay from 1-7% extra federal tax in exchange for a line-item veto on where a percentage of their taxes go. For each 1% extra they pay, they can control 2% of their money, to a maximum of 14%. So, for instance, you could pay 2 1/2% extra and say that 5% of your taxes must go to space exploration or cannot go to senator salaries. The 14%ers can actually exercise considerable budgetary (and therefore political) control. Over time the program can potentially change the government overall by hitting politicians where it hurts--- their pockets..

My understanding is that google normally has to "discover" your site by finding a link to it somewhere else. The more links to your site from google indexed sites, the faster you will appear (and the higher your page rank). Adding yourself to the Xisto Forum Directory) can help in this respect. This is a reciprocal thing: Xisto links to you and your site links back. I have a link to the specific category (Art and Creativity in my case) and a banner add for Xisto that pops up occasionally. The other thing that often helps is when people refer to your site in forum posts. If you do this too much and gratuitously, however, it is considered rude.

Like Ruben, I use Mac OS X. I have its firewall activated and am behind an Airport router which is tightened down. I do not worry about virsues--- Macs are well protected and I do not do much that is dangerous. I use F-protect on occasion to scan the shared drive for Windows viruses and I have used Clam-AV under Postfix to scan mail for viruses. I do not particularly want to pass viruses to Windows users that might not effect me.

I would appreciate it if people could take a look at The Misty Manor, Mercers. It is a craft oriented website for our farm business. I am new to Joomla and am still learning how to do little things like change the page icon. I also need to fill in more on sales and ordering, but I'd like you to look at what I have, especially from the point of view of better exploiting Joomla.

I am not Wiccan and I do not play one on TV. I have met many, however, of both types. We call the type 1's "twirly eyed". A group I knew in Tennessee were far from twirly-eyed. I sat in on one of their home-school sessions at one point. It looked just like any of the Christian home-school groups with different content. They were very nature oriented--- something that many other religions could use. The hardest bit seems to be that much of their tradition has disappeared, as a consequence of so many practitioners being killed. Many of these groups who are serious Wicca and not just anti-Christian goths try hard to reinvent their culture from fragments of the past, just like Native Americans. I also had a pair of Wiccans working for me once. Other than the fact that they took different holidays, they were just ordinary folks (well, as ordinary as anyone who worked for me).

Well, the obvious risk is that someone can compromise one of your PCs. If you are behind a wireless router, you are somewhat protected (by NAT, etc.) from the Internet, but wireless hackers are inside your firewall and can attack your systems more easily. Someone inside your firewall can also listen to your traffic, stealing passwords, recording what sites you visit, etc. They can then steal money from your PayPal account, buy things in your name on eBay, or transfer money from your bank. Other people can also share your bandwidth through your router to connect to the Internet. often this is not a big problem, but if you pay for your bandwidth, it can run up a bill. Also, if the person using your network is hacking other systems, sending SPAM, or has a virus, you may be blamed for it. Lastly, someone can eny you your service by taking over your router (they are much easier to hack from the inside), using up your bandwidth, &etc.

I am once again trying to decide what to use as my main browser on OS X. I use a number of browsers on a regular basis to test web pages, but use Safari as my default browser. Lately, I have been exploring other options. This time, I will talk about Camino, Safari, and Firefox. Later I will probably post about OmniWeb and Opera.There were several reasons I stuck with Safari as my default browser. The first was that it came with the OS and was well-integrated. At the time, Camino seemed unsable/unfinished and Firefox had a problem with my ISP which caused it to crash. Opera's ads annoyed me and OmniWeb was still very new.Safari is a good, all-around browser. It has tab support, RSS, and is reasonably fast. In short, all the basics you need. It is built on the same rendering engine as KDE's built-in browser which I use on Linux. Its biggest advantage to me is its Keychain support--- it saves and accesses passwords in the Mac OS X pasword manager. The password manager, which is loaded with dozens of randomly-generated passwords, is easy to back up, and all passwords are maintained in one place.There are several problems with Safari. The first is that it does not work well on a number of form-heavy sites, mainly governement-related, but also WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE. With sites that use TinyMCE, like Joomla-powered CMSes, the posts are never saved. This means I must use Firefox or Camino on a regular basis to access these sites. The second problem is with the Keychain integration. I like to keep multiple keychains to organize my passwords. For instance, I have a separate keychain for my craft business. Safari does not search these keychains for site passwords, even when unlocked, and does not prompt where to save passwords. Therefore, I end up with all of my website passwords in my login keychain.Safari is Apple Scriptable, and, in theory, extensible, but I have not yet found a collection of plugins nor explored the scripting possibilities.Camino also supports the keychain. It appears to access passwords in secondary keychains, but only saves to the login keychain without prompting. Camino is based on the Gecko engine that Firefox also uses. Its rendering seems a touch slower than Safari, at least on the pages I use, but is still quite fast. It also supports form-heavy sites much better. Other than that, Camino has little to recommend it. It has tabs, decent bookmark management, and other necessities, but is feature poor and has no extension mechanism that I can find. Camino's memory and disk footprint is quite big.Firefox, also based on the Gecko engine. It is the slowest loading and rendering of the three, but is still quite reasonable, especially if I leave it open on my desktop. Its memory/disk footprint is in between Safari and Camino, but I have enough RAM that it does not matter much. Firefox, like Camino, supports form-laden sites very well. It has built in RSS support, but its biggest advantage is extensibility. I have replaced the built-in RSS support with the Sage newsreader plugin, for instance, and installed ColorTabs to make tabs easier to see and recognize. Firefox is also skinable and therefore I can select the look and feel I want to have.Firefox has a number of plugins for web developers, supports XML well, and shows quite a bit of information about web pages. One quirk is that you cannot cut and past from the Page Info table. When doing web citations in papers, for instance, one cannot cut and paste the author or title fields.Firefox no longer seems to lock up with my ISP, removing one of its major obstacles for me.Firefox's biggest disadvantage is also its strongest advantage on other platforms--- password management. It does not support the keychain in any fashion. The password management has a plugin interface, but as far as I can tell, no one has ever written an extension for it. There is a post in the wicki about fixing this in a later version, but for now, I must maintain a second and redundant password store.At the moment, I will probably stick with Safari. I will explore recent versions of OmniWeb and Opera next.

The game Black and White had a virtual world with a glove interface. It could be played with a mouse, but with the glove it was much better. You could use the glove to point at, manipulate, pick up, and even throw objects with the glove. The glove (hardware) had support for very few games, but Black and White really made good use of it. The big problem with them is that there are only a few types of things at this point where a glove interface is really better than anything else. A graphics pad is better for drawing, a keyboard is better for text entry, a mouse is better for navigation and pointing. Robotics (remote control) and gaming are really the only places where they shine, and even there a modest control stick is still better for 9 out of 10 situations.

This was a network bug that happened with certain ISPs (firewall/router combos). Some people were completely unafected. For others, it would spike the CPU and lock on page loads (any). I just wanted to see if anyone playing with newer versions was still having this problem. It was particularly annoying on gov't sites with large forms where you would lose what you had entered when the browser locked. I guess the other reason I have been holding out a little on going back to Firefox is the lack of keychain support. Firefox has a plugable password storage system but no one has (to my knowledge) written a plugin for OS X keychain and I haven't had time to figure it out myself yet. Other than the lack of keychain support and the lock-ups, Firefox has been consistently better at standards compliance and page display, especially with javascript. I can never get the TinyMCE editor to work in Safari but do not have any problems in Firefox, for instance.

Here is a sketch of St. John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum): It has opposite spotted leaves and five part yellow petals in the leaf axils. The petals have small transparent spots on them which look like holes (hence "perferatum").