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.

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 liked the contrast between the poverty — the homeless man between the ‘V’ and the ‘E’ — and the message on the sign. This is in New York.

Did you notice the new little box on the left side of the screen? It’s from a new Amnesty International campaign all about freedom of expression especially on the Internet. They call it Irrepressible. I’m happy to do my small bit to help undermine censorship by publishing fragments of censored text, and I also signed the pledge. I urge you to do the same.

I’m upstairs in bed. Just having a lazy Sunday morning, there’s no rush to get up but I do feel the need for some liquid refreshment. An English man and his tea. But, then again, just lying here is so very relaxing.

B points out that the tea isn’t just going to make itself. I note that this isn’t entirely true. According to quantum theory, it is possible for elementary particles to be at opposite ends of the universe from one moment to the next. One can, therefore, conclude that, while unlikely, it is within the realms of possibility that a mug of steaming, hot tea could materialise out of no-where onto my bed-side table.

I’m not sure how true it is, but I always assume that doctors must have no fun at parties. Every time they’re introduced to someone the response is bound to be, “Oh, I have this strange tingle on my elbow…?” or “I have this pain in all the diodes on my left side.” Even lacking the title, working in IT as I do, I get the same kind of thing. “My PC blue-screens when…” or “How do I do [something esoteric] in [some weird application I’ve never heard of]?” It’s the curse of knowing something about computers.