I love it! GreaseMonkey as role model.

But, it’s an excellent analogy. Asterisk is a cool platform for clientside hacking. I gather there was a time long long ago when all the innovation in telephony ask taking place around PBX being sold to corporations. I gather that bloom of innovation was rolled up and moved back into the central offices after a while.

There is another round of innovation happening around asterisk.

Brian discussed some really creative uses, like an Asterisk based system using a webcam and other components costing under $100 that will ring the line of your choice when it senses movement. Or one of his students, who’s built an Asterisk based wakeup call system built for and used by his peers. Or a system that pings connections for his wireless ISP, and if receiving five timeouts places a call to the support technician including directions, problem description and more. Or a system that allows for a business with offices in geographies as varied as Boston and Tokyo to not only route support calls automatically to the office that’s open, but allow for local calling between them.

Asterisk isn’t particularly friendly, but even so none of those is particularly difficult. I wonder if there is a web site like userscripts.org for asterisk hacks; the closes thing is voio-info.org but that’s more a developer support site rather than a hub of hacks.