Alec Saunders SquawkBox

A couple of weeks ago we went as a family to see The Golden Compass.  Afterward, I was mystified by the fuss that the Catholic League in the United States has made about the movie.  The movie is a harmless children's fantasy, with a young girl named Lyra as the protagonist.  I enjoyed it, and couldn't see anything sacreligious about it at all.  My children, who had read the book, were disappointed.  The book, they said, was better. So I read it, then the Subtle Knife, and yesterday I finished the final book in the trilogy, the Amber Spyglass.

In Pullman's alternate universe, a world where people's souls (their daemons) are manifested as animal companions, the Catholic Church has run amock.  Ruthless, controlling and dictatorial, it is working on a weapon that can be used to control people by suppressing creativity and individual thought by means of separating their daemons from their selves.  Lyra has a special purpose and a gift, which isn't be revealed until the end of the third story, that will save the universes and thwart this ambition. 

This is no light story, however.  Throughout all three novels, Lyra confronts difficult truths, moral choices, and tragedy.  She questions authority and learns to think for herself; finds and loses love; befriends angels, witches, kings and queens; fights horrific creatures; crosses multiple universes to meet people like herself but different as well; and crosses over to the world of the dead to release their souls from purgatory to eternal happiness.

The books are well written.  Pullman has a talent for descriptive prose, dialog, and a fertile imagination. With echoes of Paradise Lost, Narnia, the Lord of the Rings, the Wizard of Oz, the Old Testament and the Book of Revelations, these are children's fantasy as it was written 100 years ago by Nesbitt, Lewis, and Tolkien.

The Catholic League's attempts to suppress this movie and these books is particularly ironic. Pullman may profess to be atheist, but the books he has written are profoundly human and religious with their themes of truth, sacrifice, love, tolerance, hope, peace and joy. 

This holiday, take a child to see the Golden Compass.  Then buy the books, read and discuss them together. Whatever your faith, you will be entertained, thrilled, and moved.

Truphone’s promotion offering free calling must be working for them.  Else why continue it?  As I was cleaning out my inbox on the drive to the Cape yesterday, I found this small announcement in my inbox:

First, the company has confirmed that its mobile VoIP service is supported on five new Wi-Fi-equipped Nokia handsets: the Nokia N95 8G, Nokia N81, Nokia N81 8G, Nokia N82 and Nokia E51 models.

Second, all Truphone call charges have been frozen at their current rates until February 29, 2008. That means that for the next two months, Truphone calls will be free to landlines in 40 countries, and to mobiles in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere.

Nice!

I got myself an early Christmas present last week.  While shopping for a Wii for my kids (and yes I got one — thank you to all the folks who had their eyes out for one for us), I stumbled upon a special that Future Shop was running here in Canada.  They had the Acer Aspire M5620 on sale for $999, or $1099 with a monitor.  The Aspire is an Intel Q6600 Core2-quad machine, with 3G of memory, a dual-head DVI out ATI Radeon HD2600 Pro, and a 500G hard disk.  The monitor that I picked up for an extra $100 is the Samsung Syncmaster 226BW, a beautiful 22" widescreen LCD with 3000:1 contrast ratio and 2ms response time.

I'd been looking at a build-your-own kit from Tiger Direct, because I want to edit high definition video. This prepackaged combo was both cheaper and better than anything I could buy there. 

So, what's it like? In a word… fast.  The snapshot below is some copying and web activity, with some background music playing.  It's barely breaking a sweat.  Two of the CPUs have a light load on them, and the other two are idling.  The biggest thing I've noticed is that I don't wait for the PC anymore.  Programs load nearly instantly. The hourglass is non-existant.  Anything that has to do with graphics editing or video rendering has become a pleasure, rather than a pain.

Just for grins, I headed over to the Apple Canada web site and configured up a similar Mac Pro. 

• 2 2Ghz Dual-Core Xeon's (they don't support the Core2 Quad Q6600)
• 2 G of memory (it was either that or 4G, so I went low)
• 1 500G hard drive
• nVidia GeForce 7300 GT 256M
• Apple 23" Cinema HD Display

The price?  $4003.  The big difference?  Two dual core Xeon's cost about $700 vs $300 for the quad core Q6600.  To balance that, these are 2Ghz processors rather than 2.4Ghz in the Q6600, and this configuration has 1G less memory as well, both of which should knock the price down.  Oh, and my box came configured with Windows Vista Home Premium rather than Leopard.

When all is said and done, you're paying nearly $3000 for Apple's brand.  There's a lesson in that, kiddies!

I've been saying for a while that VoIP has become boring. Ken Camp says it much better than I.  He says VoIP is just plumbing — a commodity item.  And he boldly predicts that companies who can't figure this out, and start focusing on applications, are going to fail in 2008.  Worth a read.  Merry Christmas Ken!

Voxeo has just announced the Voxeo Designer 8, a new call control designer for their hosted platform. 

I haven't used Designer 8, but other similar tools include ThinkEngine's CallFlowDesigner, Telephony2 CallButler (which integrates such a tool), and Angel.com.  The pioneers in this space were Pronexus with their VBVoice.   All allow scripts to be created, graphically, which can then be used to drive a call processing engine.  

The reason these applications are so important is twofold:  one is time to market. they speed the development of telephony applications.  The second, however, is that they increase the volume of innovations.  That's because these applications allow more developers to more easily write telephony applications without having to understand the nicky-norks of IVR programming. 

Three years ago the only folks I was aware of in this space were Pronexus.  It's a very good sign that so many companies are now delivering these kinds of tools.  If you think back to the early 1990's, it was the emergence of tools like Visual Basic and Delphi that led to the explosion of IT applications on Windows.  A similar, widely deployed graphical tool for telephony development could lead to the same accelerated pace of innovation in telephony.