All posts by Stephen Darlington

Photography

Photo Book Group Test (Part 1)

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Regular readers will know about my experience ordering a photo book from Apple using iPhoto 5 and cards using iPhoto 6. For my wedding I decided to get another book using the same pictures and, as far as possible, the same layout but order from three different suppliers: Apple, PhotoBox and MyPublisher. This is, therefore, going to be a four part article. This one is about the initial ordering process, then the next three will be posted when the books actually arrive.

All three orders were placed on the evening of Sunday 25th June. This is how it went.

First I looked at iPhoto as I (vaguely) knew what I was doing with it. This was a newer version of iPhoto (6 rather than 5) but pretty much all the comments I made last time are appropriate. That is: it’s incredibly easy to use, just drag and drop. If a picture is not of sufficient resolution a little yellow triangle appears to warn you. There are a number of decent themes. The only difficulty is that it seems to assume that I want a black cover on my hard-back book. As it happens I do, but I was sure there used to be a choice. It turns out there is, but only once you have clicked the “Buy Now” button. The order process is uneventful, picking up my details from my previous orders and allowing me to change them if required (I don’t). The book is just shy of 14Mb and it uploads as quickly as one might expect given the size. An email confirmation arrives shortly afterwards.

Next I decide to look at MyPublisher. MyPublisher works with both Windows and the Macintosh. For the former they provide a complete application, for the latter you can download an iPhoto plugin. I used the latter. The advantage of this is that all the lovely user interface elements are also present. Almost. One neat thing about iPhoto is that it only uploads the book once you have confirmed that everything is okay (including the price and delivery options). It, therefore, comes as a surprise when clicking the “Buy Now” button after downloading and installing the plug-in (very easy, which is why I didn’t mention it) and it immediately starts uploading it.

Once it has finished uploading it shifts focus to Safari where it asks for an email address and a password, then my address and credit-card details. And then it says that there had been a problem uploading the photo book (there were zero pages apparently). I’m not happy that they took all my personal details before announcing that there had been a technical problem.

The second time I upload things seem to go better. Upon completion it shows a screen where you can select various details of the book. MyPublisher has a better selection of covers both in terms of colours and finish (they have a leather bound book too). Thankfully they remembered my credit card details from last time. They do, however, have one last surprise for me: despite my address being in the UK (and them appearing to have a UK office), they charge me in US Dollars and charge me Fed-Ex shipping from the States.

Lastly I try PhotoBox. This is a two step process. Firstly: upload the pictures. There are a number of methods, but I choose the default which is a Java applet. You drag and drop image files into the window (I dragged them from iPhoto) and then click the “Upload” button. This takes a while as, unlike, iPhoto and MyPublisher, the full resolution images are being transferred. The pictures range from three to eight mega-pixels. In theory this should give PhotoBox the advantage when it comes to printing. We’ll see.

Stage two — building the book — is a web application. As a browser experience it is good and responsive. I try to keep the layout as similar to the iPhoto book as possible but some concessions are needed. I need to change the cover image, for example, and the first inside page, which is entirely text in iPhoto, had to be removed entirely. Page layouts are less flexible and selecting the right one is more of a manual exercise. While iPhoto dynamically changes the layout to cope with portrait versus landscape pictures, PhotoBox tends to crop the pictures and requires you to switch layouts yourself. All the formats leave space to enter captions for the photos. In trying to mirror the iPhoto layout we did not enter any, however there is still the niggling question of whether there are any “holes” in the design because of that. It’s not as WYSIWYG — you don’t see that acronym very much any more — as iPhoto.

The experience is not as good as that in iPhoto. It is, however, still very good.

I’ve not mentioned the prices of any of the books so far, and that’s because they’re all pretty much in the same ball-park: between £20 and £25 including delivery. That was including a discount from MyPublisher (seemingly “one time only” but I’ve been getting emailed the vouchers on a fairly regular basis since I first heard about the company). And for this month only PhotoBox had a special two-for-one offer, so I should be getting two identical books for the same price.

So that’s myexperience with buying process of three online photo-book merchants. Stay tuned for the results.

See:

Software

Mirror

This text is taken from the README and explains what mirror does and why I wrote it:

I think that I must have been looking for the wrong thing. When I restructured my web-site it became difficult to upload changes onto the server. What I needed was a program that copied files to the server. While I could find many programs that mirrored a web-site — copied them from the server — I couldn’t find any to do what I wanted.

Being lazy I started to look at other mirror programs with the intention of modifying them. The best candidate, when I tested it, didn’t actually work (no names!) and others had major creeping featurism. All had restrictive licenses.

So I pulled out ‘Programming Perl’ and started coding my own…

It’s not very big or complex, but it does as it says on the box. And as an added bonus it also downloads, just like all the others.

mirror-1.4.tar.gz

If you find another program that does the same job (better), let me know, I’d be interested to learn whether or not I wasted my time!

Software

GIndent

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One thing that really bugs me is badly formatted code. I’ve nearly written a PL/SQL indentation program a number of times, but have never actually? completed it.

But this time it’s different. I figured that most of the pretty printers out there are very poorly written and work only on one particular programming language. However, most languages are very similar to one another. They all have comments, blocks and ‘if’ statements.

Mine may not be much better written — you be the judge of that — but it is generic, having the capability of working with multiple languages.

It’s currently nowhere near complete, so I have uploaded my current development version to Sourceforge. You can check out the latest version here,
but don’t expect it to actually work for you just yet. There’s currently a nearly working HTML formatter and a very incomplete PL/SQL module.

Links

The Scariest Terror Threat of All

I liked Bruce Schneier’s article in Wired entitled The Scariest Terror Threat of All. Most articles we see these days are asking for more surveillance and intrusions into our private lives in order to fight the “War of Terrorism,” but this one explains why all that effort is misdirected.

[G]ood terrorist ideas are a dime a dozen. Anyone can figure out how to cause terror. The hard part is execution.

He builds his case by asking readers of his blog to post suggestions for the next big terror attack. Certainly imagination is not in short supply as some of the plots are truely scary and downright evil.

He concludes:

Terrorism has always been rare, and for all we’ve heard about 9/11 changing the world, it’s still rare.

Blog

Naked

A friend recently pledged to post to her blog at least once a day. It’s quite a target; does that much really happen in our lives to post anything insightful that frequently?

In my case the answer is “no.” I’m not nearly interesting enough, but A is doing a fine job so far as long as you don’t mind that it’s an average rather than actually a daily occurrence! That’s not to say that nothing interesting ever happens to me. Take this, for example. It happened shortly after I moved to London.

I was sat on the Northern Line on the way home. It was later than normal but not that late, say around 9pm. The carriage was busy but not packed. We were all sat there reading books, magazines, newspapers. All was normal.

At one stop, Enbankment I think, a guy steps on. He stays standing where he got on as we continue reading and the guard announces that we should stand clear of the closing doors. The train gradually accelerates into the tunnel.

I’m at that level of tiredness where my eyes are lightly skimming over the words rather than studying every detail. This is how I notice that the man has taken off his ruck-sack and has placed his jumper in it. Not significant in and of itself, I grant you, however next he tucks his t-shirt into his bag. Next his trousers are folded and placed in the bag and finally his underpants.

Ladies and gentlemen, we now have a naked man in the carriage.

But this is England. We don’t make a fuss; we, “officially” at least, don’t even notice. We’re all far too busy reading to notice that there’s a naked man no more than ten metres from where we’re sitting.

The guy casually strides along to the end of the carriage, opens the door and steps through into the next car.

You couldn’t make this kind of thing up, but it happened. I was there. If only this kind of thing happened more often then I could post a blog more often than once a month…