Bell

Big Wireless News from Industry Canada

November 28, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Industry Canada divulged plans for the upcoming auction of additional wireless spectrum: Government Opts for More Competition in the Wireless Sector. The good news is that they have set aside a good proportion of the new spectrum to new entrants into the Canadian market, as well as mandating things like shared tower space (for antennas). Hopefully this will put some price pressure on the incumbents in the Canadian wireless industry – Rogers, Telus, and Bell.

Update: Thomas Purves has written a post about this at StartUpNorth which lays out some of the implications of this announcement.

Thomas Purves has posted

April 10, 2007 by Michael Boyle

Thomas Purves has posted

a comparison of mobile data pricing in Canada and elsewhere in the world, and demonstrates that Canadian rates are by far the highest anywhere. The only *possible* light at the end of the tunnel is that if Rogers does bring in the Apple iPhone, then they’re going to have to do something to address the fact that the iPhone is designed for a pretty high level of network access, or so it seems. With any luck – but I’m not holding my breath – this will benefit Canadian customers across the board.

Ummm, it’s about both

August 10, 2001 by Michael Boyle

. The Talking Moose waded out of the mud and into the fire with his piece yesterday. It’s the most ridiculous thing the Moose, who has otherwise been a very interesting read, has ever published.

The poor Moose clearly doesn’t understand what web designers, as opposed to code monkeys or integrators, do for a living. He seems to think they need or want to code every page or something inane like that. On personal sites that may be true, but that’s just for fun.

You can’t do content management properly – or even do it at all – without a damn good designer figuring out how to make it look, and with a damn good coder to make that design work with the content management system, and without a damn good architect to make sure that it fits together well through time.

I’m just old school enough to think that all of those roles – designer, coder, and architect – are best done by a single person. But none of those interests are antithetical to using a content management system to actually make it all happen on a day-to-day basis. In fact, a CMS can’t be implemented efficiently unless those folks do good work first – otherwise, the benefit of the CMS is lost in a miasma of snippets and included code and exception-fixing.

Of course the irony is that the Talking Moose site itself is a good example of this fact. Bryan Bell couldn’t have casually changed the design of the Moose had his code (made up of HTML and CSS) not been clean and useful to begin with. Likewise, had Dave and the gang at Userland not built a weblog architecture whose function enabled the weblog form (with the calendar-based navigation etc.), Bell’s work would have been useless. And the “design” (defined strictly) would be a secondary concern had both of those things not been done well for the task at hand.

It’s absolutely about design and the kind of work people like Zeldman do and it’s all about integrating content management systems as closely as possible to the writers and other “content people” who are doing the publishing. There’s no fight here, though the Moose seems to have wanted to stir one up.

Ed reports

February 27, 2001 by Michael Boyle

Ed reports (at YULblog) on Les symponies portuaires, literally, “Port Symphonies.” I went a couple of years ago and it’s pretty cool – they take all the boats in the Old Port of Montreal – and anything else that will make big sounds – and develop an original score that they play together. The whole piece is played by ship’s horns, train whistles (on the tracks just up from the water’s edge), and the bells of Notre Dame Basilica, among other things. Be warned though – it’s not classical music or pop or anything – it’s most similar to electroacoustic music, so you should have a taste for the avant-garde if you want to go and listen.There’s more information at the Pointe-a-Calliere Museum’s website, including a clip from last year’s event.

Julian Dibbell

February 22, 2001 by Michael Boyle

has written a great article on stego, crypto, and the wonders of the net circa 1992 in Feed. His background with this stuff is almost exactly the same as mine, though I never actually called Tim May on the phone to talk about crypto. I did, however, cut my usenet teeth in alt.security.pgp; I was steeped in the literature of the time from people like Hakim Bey, Arthur and Marilouse Kroker (who I had the privilege of working with for 4 years), the CAE, and others; and I still dream, occasionally, about the promise of stego even if its most marketable use is for digital copyright tagging.