No, I haven't dropped off the face of the earth. I'm writing a couple of products right now - some for some companies we work for, another totally internal and hopefully something we can market. In short, my nose has been to the "grindstone" as it were.

I'm not gone, I'm not fed up, I still want to blog and share information - just give me some time :)

    1) Doxygen output for asterisk source tree: http://www.asterisk.org/doxygen/.
    2) Basic developer documentation: http://www.asterisk.org/doxygen/DevDoc.html.

    As is often the case in the open source community, the documentation blows....and there seems to be forty different variants of solving the same problem, each as convoluted and hackish as the other...

    ....http://www.lobstertech.com/doc/ast-12-func/.

    http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/.

    Basic terms for Digital Telephony and associated links:

DSX -
    1) http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci212004,00.html.
    2) http://www.inetdaemon.com/tutorials/telecom/ds/index.shtml. (best)

SONET -
    1) http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci214223,00.html.
    2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_optical_networking. (best)

CAS -
    1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Associated_Signaling.

ISDN -
    1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN.
    2) http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/ito_doc/isdn.htm.

Signaling System 7 -
    1) http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci214365,00.html.

    ...I just understood why a particular trick I use works in terms of call-waiting: okay...when you are on a phone that doesn't have a Link option (to transfer from one line to another) and you have another person ring-in, you know how you can QUICKLY hang up the phone and then lift up off the hook switch and get the person on the other line? The "command" to tell the Central Office to switch lines for you is actually a signal from the hook switch lasting between 200 and 1,200 ms (from roughly one fifth a second to a second and a quarter) - so if you punch the Link button your phone, you're, in effect - spoofing a hang up for roughly that amount of time...

    ....the reason this works is because the hook switch is a signalling device to the central office (when you lift up, the CO knows to send you the dial-tone, and when you push down, it tells the CO to "hang up"). Commands via the hook switch are time-based.

    A new fascination is starting to pick up with me - digital telephony, or what some people may have heard as Voice over IP (or VoIP). My contracting company did some work for a company in southern California that optimizes network traffic and wanted to extend their service to VoIP; and ever since then I've known about the technology and knew I had an interest in it, but never really started researching it in the broader sense until now (you know how it is, someone presents you with a particular problem and you solve it, but you can still totally miss the big picture). I'm learning everything I can about the field at the moment, going into "chew mode" - chewing up as much information as possible. As a side-effect, I'm adding a new category to this blog to specifically address this fascination....