Propeller-heads Unite!

Whee! Just got back from a whirlwind trip to the Los Angeles area to do a presentation at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo. Nothing like a down-and-back-in-12-hours trip to tire a guy out, but it was time well spent.

Why was I there? To show off the first iteration of the … huh, I guess we better come up with a catchy name for this thing. What we were showing off was the integration of an Asterisk front-end with a podcasting server back-end that allows a non-technical user to publish a podcast with nothing more than a telephone.

Why would we do that? One of the goals of the Oregon Virtual School District is to provide tools that make it easier for teachers focus on teaching and actually using the technology rather than fiddling with it and trying to make it work. So when we started looking at how to integrate podcasting into the OVSD suite of tools, we naturally took a look at simplifying the process of putting podcasting content up. Everyone knows how to pick up and dial a phone, so it seemed to be a natural fit: Call into an Asterisk server, record the podcast, and then have the server do all the tedious bits involved with publishing the podcast.

Even though he had never worked with Asterisk before, Peter Krenesky took the idea and ran with it, doing even more than I had initially envisioned. In a remarkably short time, he had built a dialplan and the associated scripts to not only record and publish podcast episodes, but also to allow the user to look up on the fly what podcasts are associated with their account and choose which one to use for the new episode. All via a plain old touch-tone telephone.

Dang, that’s cool. Apparently some of the folks at the expo thought the same since I had several interesting conversations after the presentation. Oh, and if the woman who gave me the thumbs-up standing at the end of the front row is out there reading this … drop me a line! I was hoping to talk to you, but you left before we were finished and I couldn’t find you afterword. :-)

As we smooth off the rough edges and add features, I’ll post more - especially those neato technological details that get my propeller beanie spinning. Stay tuned!

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One of the things we need to build for the OVSD project is a voice over IP (VoIP) tool for teachers and students to communicate with each other. Being familiar with Asterisk already, I immediately thought of it when this project came along. Mostly we plan on using it for conference calls and the like, but there are all sorts of interesting things we can do with it for podcasting and faxing as well. Regardless how we end up using Asterisk in the OVSD project, it’s an interesting use of the product.

Except for one slight problem. In order to use the MeetMe conferencing features within Asterisk, you need to install the zapel module for the clock. OK, that’s no problem, except that my development box is a Xen virtual machine. Xen virtual machines do not have access to the hardware clock. Zaptel appears to be rather unhappy about that lack of access to the hardware clock and tends to kernel panic.

Ouch. So now I need to either use a separate conference bridge application within Asterisk, or find a way to get Zaptel and Xen to play nice.

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