This last weekend we hosted our wedding reception. Actually, it’s probably our second or third depending on how you count it. But we’re not keeping track as we fully intend to celebrate for as long as we can get away with it…

Rather than book a hall and get people to sit next to almost total strangers for a couple of hours, we decided to hire a boat and cruise down the Thames for a few hours. In the end thirty-two guests turned up in the rain to help us celebrate. We sailed west towards Westminster, then east as far as Greenwhich and back to Temple.

Since MyPublisher use the same interface as Apple they are really only able to differentiate themselves on two grounds: print quality and delivery times. How did they do?

Well, the dispatch notification came on the 29th June which is quick but not as fast as Apple. Unfortunately the book arrived on 8th July, which was five days behind Apple and a full week behind PhotoBox.

But what is the book like now that it has arrived?

Apple were the first off the block. At 9am on the 27th June I receieved an email noting that my photo book had been dispatched. For some reason they are printed and mailed from “abroad” (with a Dutch customs declaration, the value in US Dollars and a German postmark) which explains why it took until 3rd July to arrive. Unfortunately I was out when it first came, so I didn’t actually pick it up until the 5th.

This is a bit of a weird one. For those that have not come across it, AllOfMP3 is a Russian competitor to music downloading sites like Apple’s iTunes Music Store. It distinguishes itself by offering higher quality (good), in a number of different formats (good), without digital restrictions managements (also good) and for a much lower cost.

(DRM is the bit in iTunes that stops you burning your purchases more than five times or streaming to more than five computers.)

I couldn’t let the inaugural train journey betweeen Beijing and Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, go by without comment. It represents a huge shift for the Tibetans and, while it could bring some positive changes, it’s more likely to bring large numbers of Chinese and a quickening of the pace of the decline of their unique culture.

Wired has a nice article — “Train to the Roof of the World” — that takes a balanced view of the technology and politics. The BBC’s — “First Beijing train reaches Lhasa” — is much shorter if you’re pushed for time!

As today is Independence Day in the US, there has been a lot of introspection on the state of the country in much of the press.

“To hate America is to hate mankind” is the UK-based Telegraph’s take on things. It investigates the results of a recent survey which concluded that “many Britons regard America as malign, although they remain fond of individual Americans.” (I’m anti-Dubya but married a Californian so I think it’s fair to say that I agree with that!)

PhotoBox in many ways have the advantage. Not only were they working with the full resolution images, but they are also a completely UK-based organisation. Their offices are only on the other side of London which has to help delivery times!

Nevertheless, at the risk of giving away some of the results from the other two vendors, they were the last to send a “dispatch notice” email, on the 30th June.

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.

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.

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.