I was fortunate enough to be able to take Jim Van Meggelen up on his offer of free passes to ETel[1] in San Francisco this past week, and to speak briefly on Zork and Asterisk[2] to a crowd of fellow enthusiasts.
First of all, I have to say that being a presenter at the very beginning of the conference was a fantastic icebreaker, and I'm glad I let Jim talk me into it. People already knew who I was, and would just spontaneously walk up to me to talk. The overall air of the conference was full of excitement and passion too. Each time there was a break in the speakers, the doors to the conference rooms would burst open, and the foyer would explode in dialog with everyone beaming ear to ear. The first day was split into 4 sessions, with three separate tracks. I was a little out of it in the morning, preparing for my part in the hack session that Jim hosted. It was well received. I got quite a bit of useful feedback from the audience, such as the suggestion that I embed Sphinx into asterisk using res_perl (why didn't I think of that?!). There was a cool hack on automatic provisioning by Steve, a developer at Sun Labs. If an unprovisioned phone were plugged into the network, it would download a basic configuration from a TFTP server. Then, any number you dialled would send you to a provisioning context in his asterisk dialplan, which prompted you for your extension and PIN -- it would validate that against Sun's LDAP server, build a configuration file specific to you, and then reboot your phone. Voila, no administrator intervention required. He also had a similar process for interns, who didn't yet have extensions assigned. Another interesting project that was presented in the hacks session was AstLinux[3], a very tiny asterisk distribution that will fit on a compact flash card, cdrom, or run from an image inside of VMWare's free virtual machine player[4] -- this allows you to experiment with a fully functional asterisk installation without installing any operating systems, or wiping any hard drives. In the afternoon, I attended a session on developing your own linux cellphone running on gumstix[5] computers. Most of it was focused on sourcing parts -- I found the Telit GM862 RF module[6] particularly interesting. It takes a standard cellphone GSM card, and gives you a rich set of modem AT-style commands to control the unit to open up voice or data channels. Wednesday and Thursday things kicked into warp speed. The days were split up into 15 minute lightning presentations. I think it was a fantastic format. Presenters got to the point quickly, there was virtually no filler -- and if the presenter was a little dry, you only had to sit through 15 minutes of it. I'll touch on my favourites very briefly: "Make it Talk", Kevin Lenzo from Cepstral [7] spoke about their commercial variant of the popular Festival Text-To-Speech program. He also gave out free developer licenses to all attendees. The voices are absolutely top notch, and much more affordable than other voices of similar quality I've seen on the net. I downloaded them, and replaced the voice I was using in Zasterisk -- it sounds much more human now! "Rural Voices: Indiana Farm Net". Brian Capouch, a professor in Indiana has deployed a wireless network that covers thousands of square kilometres of rural Indiana on a budget, providing high speed internet access and dial tone in some of the most under serviced communities in the U.S., truely uplifting a community that had been left behind in the digital divide. His network is based on Linux OpenWGT[8], Asterisk, and the NetGear WGT634u (an amazing device which blows away the Linksys WRT54g). It was a story of incredible achievement at low cost; however his entire project is overshadowed by telcos lobbying politicians to outlaw municipal and community wireless networks. "Security on VoIP". Phillip Zimmerman, the author of PGP (software for encrypting and signing documents and emails) spoke on his soon-to-be-released VoIP encryption software. It works independently of SIP by encrypting RTP streams end to end. The part I found particularly clever was his technique for verify that there is no man in the middle snooping your call (I'm not a crypto expert, so the details are a bit fuzzy). Essentially, the way it works is that once a call is set up, you speak your public key to the other person, and verify that that is what they received on their end. Now the really clever part is that for each subsequent call to the same party, your previous key and previous remote party's key are used to generate a key for this call, creating a trust relationship in the same manner that Verisign signs an SSL certificate for Thawte, and then Thawte can sign your certificate, and so on. "Speakeasy: using open source to overcome barriers and promote community development". Tad Hirsh spoke about a system that he's built on asterisk and other open source software to create a network of volunteer translators. People could list their numbers and hours of availability to provide translation services. They were then called by the asterisk systems and bridged into calls with new immigrants and the party they were trying to communicate with. I could go on and on, and I encourage everyone whose interested in the bleeding edge to attend next year ;-) Cheers, Simon P. Ditner [1] ETel - http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etel2006/ [2] Zork and Asterisk - http://uc.org/read/Zasterisk [3] AstLinux - http://www.astlinux.org [4] VMWare Playher - http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ [5] GumStix - http://www.gumstix.com/products.html [6] Telit GM826 - http://www.telit.co.it/modulef.asp?famId=2&famName=The%20GM862%20Family [7] Cepstral - http://www.cepstral.com [8] OpenWGT - http://openwgt.informatik.hu-berlin.de -- | First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, | then you win. -- Mohandas Gandhi | | The Toronto Asterisk Users Group | Join the discussion group by visiting http://taug.ca | or by sending email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
