Serving the Guest: A Sufi Cookbook
Essays | Recipes | Gallery



Technical Notes
Al-Khwarizmi, the great Arab mathematician, commemorated on a Soviet stamp, 1983. The word 'algorithm' was derived from his name. Click to view a page from his Kitab al-Jabr wal-Muqabala, the oldest Arabic work on algebra.

December 2016 update: I have reformatted the website to improve viewing on mobile devices, replacing all framesets with single-frame displays, and reducing the maximum width of displays so that they work better on the small screen. To improve site security, I have removed all Javascript, including browser detection and browser-specific stylesheets. All footnote links are underlined; they are still embedded in periods at the end of the sentence in which each footnote occurs.

August 2000: This website was written and produced by the author of Serving the Guest, Kathleen Seidel.

Serving the Guest was researched with the extensive assistance of the Interlibrary Loan Service of the Peterborough (NH) Town Library, with particular help from Mrs. Judy Garabrant. It was written using Microsoft Word on an IBM PC running Windows '95.

The website was developed in August-September 2000 using Allaire Home Site on an IBM PC running Windows NT, with additional testing done on a Macintosh G4. Pages have been tested on Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator on both platforms. Many of the black-and-white illustrations were culled from ArtToday, a provider of images in the public domain. Other illustrations were scanned using a Microtek scanner. Adobe Photoshop and Jasc Paint Shop Pro were used to edit and optimize the images.

The inital version of the Javascript code for the left column index was borrowed from phpMyAdmin by Tobias Ratschiller, and was subsequently modified by David Seidel.

This site is best viewed at a resolution of 800x600 or greater -- 1024x768 is ideal -- and requires a Javascript- and frames-capable browser.

Links to footnotes within essays are embedded into the period at the end of each sentence in which a footnote occurs. This was done to eliminate excess visual clutter and the linespacing problems posed by the use of superscript. If the reader wants to know the source of the information within any sentence, try the period for a link. Mousing over the link will cause a tooltip to appear.