If you came here for advance information or predictions about Apple’s much discussed table, I am afraid I have neither. In fact, I am fairly sure that what I am about to tell you is unlikely to happen, so, there you are.

On the other hand, I have certain hopes for the product and one, in particular, is something that I haven’t seen anyone in the media discuss: could the Jesus Tablet revolutionize the way we buy and use wireless data?

Everyone agrees with the fact that the tablet will have some kind of 3G or 4G wireless cellular connectivity, but they all seem to take for granted that network access will be provisioned the same way it is done with the iPhone.

The tablet, however, is not a phone—quite the contrary—and, therefore, it’s perhaps a good idea to ask whether Apple may not be looking for ways to create an even more captive market.

To understand what the implications might be, one only needs look at the Kindle. It hasn’t occurred to me until recently that the killer feature of Amazon’s reader is not the e-ink screen, or the vast selection of books—it’s the fact that it makes accessing a cellular network completely seamless: there are no contracts for you to sign (except the one with Amazon), no data fees to pay (except the ones you pay to Amazon as part of your purchases) and—most importantly—no roaming fees to deal with.

In other words, even though it doesn’t look like one, the Kindle is a cell phone that works the world over through a single provider that is not your cellco. In fact, looking at Amazon’s recent announcement of its revised royalty scheme for the Kindle, you can see that they are planning to charge $0.15/MiB for data transfer, regardless of where the user is in the world. To put things in perspective, the lowest price that is available to me while roaming in the States is $1/MiB—and that’s if I pay a $10 monthly fee to get it reduced from $6/MiB, if I sign a long term agreement and if I agree to pay on top of my regular voice and data plan.

Compare this experience with the absolute hell that dealing with your current cellular company is, and you will see that there is an opportunity, for a sophisticated player, to create a wave of unprecedented disruption in the wireless market.

If Apple were to sell the tablet and make a data plan available through Apple, a number of really important things would happen:

• First, its users would become entirely captive—no messing around with third-party companies, subsidies, and the likes
• Second, a clueful company would, for the first time in history, be in control of a wireless experience end-to-end. Just like the iPhone’s killer feature is the App Store, this could be the tablet’s one defining characteristic
• Third, Apple’s immense buying power would bring costs down to a level that is going to be difficult to beat
• Fourth, the fact that it doesn’t look like a phone doesn’t mean that the tablet couldn’t work like one—and without pesky wireless companies dictating terms, no-one would prevent customers from installing Skype or a SIP client on their systems
• Fifth, Apple could easily integrate this service with others it already provides (MobileMe Data?)

The disruption of this approach would be nearly total: because customers purchase service from Apple, the underlying network provider becomes little more than a curiosity, and it’s not unthinkable for our friends from Cupertino to eventually set up their own global wireless network.

Of course, I have no illusion that it’s highly unlikely for any of this to happen—I mean, the wireless companies cannot possibly be so shortsighted to let this happen, right?

Right?

Image credit: Tablets by swimboy1

I hate flying.

I cannot, for the love of me, believe that something like this is coming out of Canada:

The travel restriction for citizens of both Mexico and the Czech Republic was announced last Monday and went into effect the following day, catching many travellers off guard before the start of vacations.

The new rule was imposed in response to the rising number of bogus refugee claims from the two countries.

I’m not sure if I’m more appalled at the fact that our government would pull a stunt like that, or at the comments that readers of the G&M have left.

Canada is one of the last countries that are truly open to immigration and despite—no thanks to—that fact, we have one of the lowest criminality rates in the world. Props to the government for its mad skillz, and to the idiots who think it has handled the situation well.

Like many a small business, MTA uses VoIP for its phone services—after all, our employees are all over the place, and POTS lines just wouldn’t do it. Through the clever combination of VoIP and Asterisk, the phone bill for the entire company still comes in at under $50 a month.

Plus, Asterisk gives us a number of advantages when we’re on the go. For example, we use a DISA to cause our PBX to bridge a new line into an incoming call, thus allowing us to make long-distance calls from any phone by paying only our incoming and outgoing rates—given that 1-800 service costs us around $0.03 a minute, and outgoing long-distance service costs around $0.02 a minute, $0.05 a minute sounds like a very attractive rate when you’re away from home and need to make a call; all you need is a payphone and you’re in business.

DISA works well from cell phones, too—but here there are a few pet peeves. A DISA call requires me to make an outgoing call (which is always billable on my cell phone plan) to the office, dial a special code and then dial the phone number I want to reach… and my memory for phone numbers isn’t all that good. The fact that I can’t seem to dial a number from my address book while I’m on a call really irks me: the data is there, the technology isn’t that complicated, and the only reason that I can think of why this wouldn’t be allowed is that telephone companies don’t want it to… which, to me, sounds like a really good reason why it should.

Asterisk to the rescue
Thus, I have been thinking of coming up with a solution that solves all these problems—with the possible added benefit of sticking it to the phone company*. Yesterday, I finally had a couple of hours to spend on it, and this is what I came up with.

First, I have a small PHP script that runs on one of our servers. The script takes a phone number in input (as well as a shared secret in case someone gets a hold of the address) and then creates a small call file, which is sent to Asterisk. The call file, combined with a specially-built context, instructs Asterisk to:

1. Set its Caller ID to the outgoing phone number
2. Call my cell phone
3. Upon pick up, play a simple voice messsage (“Press 1 to complete your call”)
4. When 1 is pressed, initiate a call to the outgoing phone number
5. Bridge the two calls

Item #1 on the list is mostly a nice touch—by setting the CID to the number I’m trying to dial, I can still have a meaningful record of the conversation in my iPhone’s call log. Items 2 through 4 call me cell phone (incoming calls are free, you see) and then wait for some action on my part; this ensures that, should I fail to pick up or the call go to voicemail, the person I want to call doesn’t end up getting into an argument with my recorded messages. Item #5, finally, completes the bridge, thus giving me a completely free call to either an internal MTA extension or an arbitrary external number.

On the iPhone
So, far, there is nothing special about my set up. I can now make phone calls simply by invoking a script through HTTP—something that can easily be done from an iPhone without the need for anything more than stock software: I could just use Safari to call up the script and be done with it.

However, this doesn’t directly solve the problem with being unable to dial from my address book. This is where the couple hours of free time last night came into play. Armed with the GM release of the 3.0 SDK, I wrote a little application that allows me to initiate a bridged call either by dialing a number or by calling up my address book, and then selecting a contact and a phone number:

Clearly, this app is not going to make it to the App Store any time soon, but it’s a great little thing to have for me and the rest of the staff.

* I don’t usually advocate sticking it to anyone—but, unfortunately, for the phone company, I happen to know what their operating costs are, and am fully aware of the fact that they are, indeed, sticking it to me with their $0.30 per minute (plus another $0.20 for long distance) rates. Therefore, it is only fair to return the favour.

As there is clearly big business to be had and I seem to be one of the few in the community who hasn’t sold out his life-story rights, I would like to announce the upcoming* Twitter Dinner with Marco Tabini. For a small fee (plus the cost of food), I will show you how to:

• Create a Twitter account that you most likely won’t use
• Post messages that most likely nobody will ever care about
• Open up your wallet and give me all your money
• Sign off on that once-in-a-lifetime Nigerian real-estate deal that you’ve been deftly avoiding all your life.

Don’t wait! Seating at my local McDonald’s is limited. Sign up today!

* Dates and times to be determined (a 20-minute seating limit applies before the cops cite us for loitering).

Brooklyn novelist Peter Brett found his muse and wrote first novel commuting on the F line

If the world were a less stupid place, there really would be no need for bookstores. You’d simply go online, find a book you want and have it printed out remotely at a location that’s convenient to you. This way, publishers would save money by not having to print a million copies to sell 100,000, authors would be able to negotiate higher royalties and not have to deal with the problem of accounting for reserves and returns, and the entire accounting process would be simple and automatic. And don’t even get me started on the savings for the environment: no more shipping, no more waste of paper (since you only print what you need) and a greater distribution of refuse.

Every now and then, I come across a news item—like this—which talks about some poor guy (or gal) somewhere who had the distinctly unpleasant surprise of receiving a $25,000 bill because his or her phone was stolen and used to call Namibia, or Peru, or the Moon.

I feel for those people—I really do. I’ve paid a $20,000 telco bill a few times (alas, all legitimately billed) and I know how painful it is when you expect it… so, I can only imagine how horrible it must be when you don’t.

On the surface, this looks like pure greed on behalf of phone companies that will do whatever they can to screw the little guy. Sure, it’s your responsibility to monitor your phone usage, but it’s trivial for the phone company to put an automatic block on your account when you go, say, 10% over your average monthly spending for the last 12 months (incidentally, the company I use, Fido, does this by default—an act of uncharacteristic decency for a company owned by the worst media conglomerate in Canada). The credit card industry has done it and, realistically, it should be at most a handful of lines of code.

However, let me give you this little story from my bag of “I can’t believe I once heard this” tales. About seven or eight years ago, I did some work for a telco—whose name shall remain unnamed in order to protect the innocent, the guilty and the NDA I signed. One of the subprojects—for which, luckily, I wasn’t responsible—was the ability to bill customers directly on their phone bill.

This involved interfacing with the department that handles the billing system, which claimed—I kid you not—that adding a new revenue centre to said billing system required a whopping seven months of notice.

If adding a new item to a phone bill can “take” seven months, I will let you imagine the massive amount of time and resources that implementing a simple anti-fraud system can require. It’s just the way these companies roll—which is, unfortunately, much sadder than if they were actually trying to screw people over.

It appears that spammers have plenty of time on their hand; therefore, since neither CAPTCHAs nor moderation on old posts seem to deter them, I have turned on full moderation on this blog.

One of the downsides of working in the publishing business is that, after a relatively short amount of time, one loses the ability to enjoy reading the way normal people do.

This is not to mean that I no longer like to read—quite the contrary—but that I no longer can read any text on any medium without paying attention to its typographical design. Conversations between my partners and I usually start with “did you read that book?” and end up in some variation of “yes, the font was awesome—but they clearly haven’t mastered a good justification algorithm yet.”*

On the web, most people don’t seem to know what to make of basic typography. In an effort to improve the general state of things, let me introduce you to three typographical elements that I use more often than, it seems, most other people: the endash, the emdash and the ellipsis.

Endashes and emdashes (also called en-dashes and em-dashes) are closely related cousins of the comma and semicolon. An endash (so called because it is roughly the width of the glyph n) is used to indicate a range. For example:

php|architect, Volumes I–IV

The use of an endash, as opposed to the simple dash, is useful because it’s less likely that an automated process reading through a piece of text will confuse a range for a subtraction. This may seem trivial until you find yourself in the position of having to parse large quantities of text for the purpose of, say, compiling a book. It’s happened to me once, and I’ve been a proponent of endashes ever since.

On OSX, the endash can be produced by typing ⌥ + – (that’s Option-minus sign).

The emdash (whose name derives from the fact that it’s roughly the width of the glyph m) is (primarily—it also has other uses) a distant cousin of the comma. You can use it to indicate a portion of text that would normally belong between parentheses—in fact, it was once described to me as somewhere between a comma and a parenthetical remark. Think of the emdash as one more weapon in your grammatical arsenal—it’s less ambiguous than a comma (which, after all, could be used for a number of different reasons). It provides a considerable amount of separation between the two words that surround it—thus giving your eyes a visual queue that a new remark is being introduced.

The setting of an emdash—that is, whether it should be surrounded by a space (open setting) or not (closed setting), is a matter of much debate. I have a personal preference for closed setting, because I like how an emdash visually links two words while actually providing separation in the thread of a sentence.

On OSX, an emdash is produced by typing ⌥ + ⇧ + – (that’s Option-Shift-minus sign).

Finally, the ellipsis is a glyph that most people are familiar with—they just don’t use it properly. An ellipsis is a series of three small dots that either identifies an omission in the text or an aposiopesis (that is, an unfinished sentence). For example, I could use an ellipsis as such:

If I only had a few million dollars to spare…

Most people, as I mentioned, create an ellipsis using three periods. This is wrong. Please, please, stop doing that. Periods have a number of uses, but producing an ellipsis is not one of them—unless, of course, you’re stuck in 1947 and your keyboard goes “clackety-clack” when you type. In that case, you have my sympathies.

Jokes aside, there are a number of good reasons why you should learn to use the proper ellipsis glyps instead of three periods. First of all, it’s typographically correct—most likely, your font glyps have been properly calibrated so that the individual marks of the ellipsis are the correct size (which is probably not the same size as a period) and are at the proper distance (which is definitely not the same as the distance between three periods). Additionally, you provide a valuable clue to any piece of software tasked with analyzing your text. Finally, you save two characters—which is very handy in today’s Twitter world.

On OSX, you can produce an ellipsis by typing ⌥ + ; (that’s Option-semicolon).

There you have it—three important typographical elements that will make your text more articulate. Of course, the rules for their usage are all but set in stone—there are plenty of conflicting schools of thought on the use of endash vs. emdash, for example (heck, there are conflicting schools of thought on how they should be called, let alone used), but the use of proper typography is an excellent device to force you to think more closely about your writing habits—especially your grammar.

* Of course, such discussions never centre around our own products, which are, by definition, perfect.