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<< Tuesday, October 05, 2004 >> |
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Computer telephony: why wait?
The other day I had one of those living-in-the-future moments. An important phone call came in, but the colleague I needed to bring into the call wasn't available, and the caller couldn't wait. So, with the caller's permission, I recorded the call and forwarded it as an MP3 file to my colleague. When she later replayed the conversation, she got crucial points -- both factual and emotional -- that I never could have accurately reported.
VoIP fantasy come true? Not even close. The call came in on a POTS line. I answered on a regular -- not even cordless -- telephone. The integration between the voice and data networks was courtesy of JK Audio's QuickTap.
...
There are dozens of ways in which personal computers can add value to the PSTN. Caller ID screen pops, conference call setup, call logging, voice archiving, and user-programmable IVR (interactive voice response) are just some of the productivity aids that we should all take for granted by now -- but that almost nobody can.
The story of the Bellheads vs. the Netheads is a myth in the primary sense of that word. It explains a real conflict between worldviews in a way most people can easily understand, and that's useful. But we can't believe it literally. If the mammals keep waiting for the dinosaurs to die out, we'll keep missing chances to exploit them. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
When you click through to the column, you'll see that its title -- as published online and in the print magazine -- uses the phrase "IP telephony," not "computer telephony" as originally written. I can understand why the change was made: the former term is more familiar than the latter. And that's exactly my point. We tend to assume that the integration of computers and telephones means both devices must use TCP/IP. That's an enabler, but not a requirement. There's a ton of useful integration you can do by bridging between TCP/IP and the PSTN.
Here's an variation of the example I gave in the column. Recently, while recording a phone conversation, I wanted to bring new participants into the call. On my end of the call, I used three-way calling to bring in another POTS line. On the other end of the call, my partner did the same. Using my Internet-attached computer, I can do all sorts of interesting things with the resulting MP3 file: filter it, edit it, email it, blog it. Just because your phone and computer don't use the same network for audio data doesn't mean your phone and computer can't be usefully combined.
Here's another example: Asterisk, the open source PBX for Linux. It supports various flavors of VoIP. But fundamentally, it's a PBX. You can use it simply to add intelligent control to your POTS lines, and that's just what some folks do.
VoIP is terrific, and it's the future. But that future isn't evenly distributed yet, and won't be for a while. In the meantime, let's not lose sight of the original sense of the phrase computer telephony. It's compatible with, but not necessarily the same as, IP telephony.
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Page-addressable PDF
In yesterday's item I complained about the opaqueness of PDF files. As Mark Kunzmann pointed out (in email), the situation is less dire than I suggested. He illustrated by pointing me to page 100 of the government's energy report here. I can point you to the page describing necessary URL syntax here. This scheme is workable, for large documents like the 170-page energy report, thanks to the same HTTP 1.1 byte-range technology that I've been using for random access to MP3 audio.
Thanks for the reminder, Mark. This falls into the category of things I used to know, but forgot. Now arguably, there's a reason I forgot about it. You rarely (if ever) see PDF URLs ending with #page=6 in the wild. My feeling is that's because a PDF page is an arbitrary unit of content, and it usually won't precisely address the element you'd like to refer to.
Note that there's also the #nameddest option, which works like an HTML fragment identifier and takes you to a specific location within a page. However this seems to be used even more rarely. I suspect that's because of the manual nature of the procedure required to prepare the destinations. Courtesy of Planet PDF, here is that procedure:
First up, you'll need to create the destination. To do this from within Acrobat:
- Manually navigate through the PDF for the desired location, and magnification
- Go to View > Navigation Tabs > Destinations
- Under Options, choose Scan Document
- Once this is completed, select New Destination from the Options menu and enter an appropriate name
Now that you have created your destination, you can link to it using
a similar syntax to that used for page linking. After the name of the
PDF, append "#nameddest=" and the name of your chosen destination. So,
if your PDF has a named destination, "TOC", that points to a table of
contents, then your link code will look like this:
<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#nameddest=TOC">Link text</a>
[Planet PDF]
Live and learn. Or in this case, relearn!
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