Where Everybody's Crazy

Dear lazyweb: Do we know anyone who would be capable at looking at some book royalty statements and work out whether a certain publisher - which is not O'Reilly, nor is it Manning - is stiffing me?

The trick appears to be moving the goalposts by adjusting the amount that gets paid into the "reserve for returns" account to keep royalties under the 25%-of-reserve threshold (which is itself a new one on me) so that they never have to pay me. But I don't know whether the "amount applied to recoupment" and the "reserve" and the "royalty earned" are meant to follow some logical relationship to sales, or if it's all voodoo economics that I shouldn't be able to figure anyway.

They aren't replying to my emails for clarification, which doesn't help the impression. Hell, they didn't even agree to pay me a royalty until I complained about it here, so let's see what happens this time. :)

Update: OK, a flash of inspiration and a bit of quality time with Excel means I now know that Beginning Perl needs to sell another 815 copies before I see any cash from it. Go to it!

Meanwhile, reverse-engineering spreadsheets is fun. :) I seem to recall Jocelyn wrote something to do it...

Update 2: More quality time suggests that they are actually stiffing me; if they had applied the royalty rate that they claim appliess, it should only need to sell 75 copies before I get royalties. But their calculations say 815. Oops.

Dear lazyweb: I'm teaching a five-session web design course here next term. The first session will be on how the web works (ie, why you need a hosting provider) and also what makes a good web page. The second will be on free tools to create web sites, (Any ideas of decent ones on Windows? I'm guessing Mozilla Composer > Frontpage Abomination, but it seems to want to pull down the whole Mozilla Suite. Anyone played with Nvu?) and doing FTP stuff to upload them.

The last session will be on free ways to go beyond plain hosting: blogging, using Flickr for photo hosting, mailing list management, and maybe a plug for my own hosting thing if I get it up and running in time.

What should go in sessions three and four?