Colophon
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The animals on the cover of Oracle & Open Source are garden spiders. Garden spiders (Areneus diadematus) are orb-spinning garden dwellers. They’re about one to one and three-quarter inches long, generally brownish in color, with a white cross pattern on their abdomen, formed by the guanine crystals they excrete as a waste product.
All spiders are members of the class Arachnida. In mythology, Arachne was a master weaver who, bold and supremely confident of her abilities, challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest. Both wove beautiful, perfect tapestries, but even Minerva had to admit that Arachne’s was superior. In a fit of jealous rage, Minerva destroyed Arachne’s tapestry, and Arachne, humiliated and despondent, tried to hang herself. Minerva turned the rope from which Arachne hung into a web, and Arachne herself into a spider.
The orb web that a garden spider weaves is the quintessential spiderweb, several spokes radiating from a central point, joined by a widening spiral of silk. The silk comes from six spinnerets on the underside of the spider’s body. Each spinneret has hundreds of tiny spigots, each of which in turn is connected to a silk gland that can produce five different types of silk. The output of the spigots is joined together into a thread, and the spider uses one thread or several joined together to perform different tasks. The spiral lines of the web, for instance, are made up of two threads of one type of silk plus a third thread of sticky silk; the spider “twangs” each stretch of line to distribute the sticky glue into many tiny globules along the length of the line.
Once the garden spider has finished weaving her web (and it’s only the female garden spiders who weave webs), she builds herself a small nest a short distance from the web; she keeps in contact with the web through a telegraph line of silk, which alerts her when an insect blunders into the web. If it’s a small bug that she can overpower, she takes it directly to the nest to kill and eat. Larger bugs she traps in a cocoon of silk and often stores to eat later.
Leanne Soylemez was the production editor and copyeditor for Oracle & Open Source. Colleen Gorman was the proofreader, and Emily Quill and Sarah Jane Shangraw provided quality control. Ellen Troutman Zaig wrote the index.
Ellie Volckhausen designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with Quark™XPress 4.1 using Adobe’s ITC Garamond font.
Melanie Wang and David Futato designed the interior layout based on a series design by Nancy Priest. Anne-Marie Vaduva converted the files from Microsoft Word to FrameMaker 5.5.6 using tools created by Mike Sierra. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book; the code font is Constant Willison. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. This colophon was written by Leanne Soylemez.
The online edition of this book was created by the Safari production group (John Chodacki, Becki Maisch, and Madeleine Newell) using a set of Frame-to-XML conversion and cleanup tools written and maintained by Erik Ray, Benn Salter, John Chodacki, and Jeff Liggett.