Page 24 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

First of all, I need to thank Leif and Jared for inviting me to join the Asterisk Docu-
mentation Project. I have immensely enjoyed working with both of you, and I am
constantly amazed at how well our personalities and skills complement each other. A
truly balanced team, are we. Also, thanks goes to Figment for all the typing.

To my wife Killi, and my children Kaara, Joonas, and Joosep (who always remember
to visit me when I disappear into my underground lair for too long): you are a source
of inspiration to me. Your love is the fuel that feeds my fire, and I thank you.
Obviously, I need to thank my parents, Jack and Martiny, for always believing in me,
no matter how many rules I broke. In a few years, I’ll have my own teenagers, and it’ll
be your turn to laugh!
To Mark Spencer: thanks for all of the things that everybody else thanks you for, but
also, personally, thanks for giving generously of your time to the Asterisk community.
The Toronto Asterisk Users’ Group (http://www.taug.ca) made a quantum leap forward
as a result of your taking the time to speak to us, and that event will forever form a part
of our history. Oh yeah, and thanks for the beers, too. :-)
Finally, thanks to the Asterisk Community. This book is our gift to you. We hope you
enjoy reading it as much as we’ve enjoyed writing it.

Leif Madsen

The road to this book is a long one—nearly three years in the making. Back when I
started using Asterisk, possibly much like you, I didn’t know anything about Asterisk,
very little about traditional telephony, and even less about Voice over IP. I delved right
into this new and very exciting world and took in all I could. For two months during a
co-op term, for which I couldn’t immediately find work, I absorbed as much as I could,
asking questions, trying things and seeing what the system could do. Unfortunately
very little to no documentation existed for Asterisk, aside from some dialplan examples
I was able to find by John Todd, and having questions answered by Brian K. West on
IRC. Of course, this method wasn’t going to scale.
Not being much of a coder, I wanted to contribute something back to the community,
and what do coders hate doing more than anything? Documentation! So I started The
Asterisk Documentation Assignment (TADA), a basic outline with some information
for the beginnings of a book.
Shortly after releasing it on my web site, an intelligent fellow by the name of Jared Smith
introduced himself. He had similar aspirations for creating a “dead-tree” format book
for the community, and we humbly started the Asterisk Documentation Project. Jared
set up a simple web site at http://www.asteriskdocs.org, a CVS server, and the very first
DocBook-formatted version of a book for Asterisk. From there we started filling in
information, and soon had information submitted by a number of members of the
community.

xxii | Preface