Great Presentations

• Asterisk Architecture (part of the Introduction to Asterisk Development block) by David Vossel. While the presentation rehashed a lot of the information in the Asterisk chapter of The Architecture of Open Source Applications, the presentation made Asterisk development feel much more approachable.
• Asterisk Webphone by Chris Mattheiu. Very impressive minimal softphone in a browser. Fun to watch someone daring enough to write code live during a presentation. The only downside was that the web phone requires a proprietary Jingle to SIP gateway.
• IPv6 -- the (Only) Way Forward by Owen DeLong. No nonsense presentation about what it takes to start using IPv6. I appreciated the candor about what works and what doesn't. Especially enjoyable was the VOIP vendor wall of shame.
• Clustering and Scaling Asterisk with Kamailio by Klaus Darilion. Using a proxy in front of Asterisk is a complex subject and Klaus did a great job distilling the details into a great look at what's possible. I use OpenSIPS for a similar purpose and picked up a few config items I can simplify.
• Cooking with Asterisk by Leif Madsen. Solid examples of neat things you can do in the dialplan. The example using Originate and chan_spy to playback a recorded message to one side of the call was impressive.

Stuff I Want to Try Now

• Adhearsion - Advanced Asterisk call control in Ruby
• StarPy - AGI and AMI interface for Twisted
• CMU Sphinx and PocketSphinx - Voice recognition
• Phono - Almost pure Javascript web phone
• Tropo - Voice, SMS, and XMPP API

The Fun Stuff

• Overheard some "creative" methods to deal with users that want to fax during a discussion about fax support on Asterisk SCF.
• Watching Clod Patry win all the tickets in one of the arcade games at the party.
• Best Business Card: TechPro used cleaning cloths for glasses as business cards. Especially useful with all the snow and water I got on my classes on the way to the conference.