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.

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.

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.