Steph, I use to have to deal with that for pubmed, back when I worked for an environmental health publisher. What people said above should work fine. If you're going to spend a lot of time messing around in xml, you might want to look into BBEdit, which is Mac native and something I really miss, being on a PC these days. BBEdit color codes tags and whatnot, so it's easy to see what bit of code is supposed to do what. Notepad's all well and good, but if you leave off a bracket it doesn't give you a color-coded way to see where it all went wrong. (Although Notepad++ for PC works pretty well. It's still not the same. *sniff*)

Datamancer accepting steampunk laptop pre-orders

Fuck.

goes to look for change in cushions, hoping to find $5500....

Actual site with more pretty pictures: [link]

The electricity in my house has taken to hiccup. It's not enough to cause my clocks to reset, but it's enough to make the 'puter reboot. I have a good surge protector, so I'm not worried about that, but I figure I ought to get a UPS. Any recommendations? Costs vary widely, and I'm not sure what I really need. I don't think I'd need backup power for very long. Do they all automatically switch back to the AC when it comes back up?

We use the APC 800 for our workstations at work. A quick google showed one for $131.

Mines's worked find, but my boss's has often failed to prevent his computer from shutting down. He did a reset on it, and that seems to have fixed the problem. So I guess our experience with them has been mixed.

Tom -- With the APC model, when power comes back on, do you need to do anything? The description for a similar model says that "once the event is over, simply reset the breakers on the unit and get back to work." but I might not be around when the power goes out for a few seconds. Would I be screwed if I don't reset it in time?

No, you don't need to do anything once the power goes back on. A little popup near the system tray will tell you you're on battery power and then it'll tell you when your AC power comes back on, but that's it.

Huh. So what's that "reset the breakers" business about, then?

When I was putting my laptop into standby in xp was that the equivalent of sleep or hibernate in Windows 7?

I'm going to guess sleep. How long did it take it to come back to full working order?

Sleep leaves the memory powered, so the whole computer continues to drain power, though obviously way less than when it's on. Hibernate copies the RAM to your hard disk and shuts down, then when you start it back up copies the data back to RAM and resumes operation where it left off. It therefore uses no power, but at the cost of taking significantly longer to return to a working state. The Mac has similar settings (when I use my laptop all the way to battery death or sleep it long enough for the battery to drain, it hibernates automatically).

The one thing that annoys me about mu current cheapy APC backup is that when there is a power problem it beeps until the power is normal. Hey UPC I noticed the lights are flickering. If power stays bad very long I will shut down. Don't need your nagging. Do more modern ones not do this?