Matt Schmandt

I started using Google’s experimental 411 service a few weeks ago and it has been working out very well. The number is call is 800-GOO-G411 or 800-466-6411. I don’t have any experience with any other 411 services so I can’t compare the features but Google’s service is a 800 number and there are no fees.

The whole system works with voice recognition. The first thing it asks you is what city and state you are looking for information about. Next, it asks you for the name of the business. It will then list the top 8 results. It will iterate through them stating the business name and address. You can choose the business you want by saying “number 1″ or “number 2.” From there you can just wait and it will connect you or you can say details and it will give you even more information about that result. At any time you can say “go back” or “start over.”

The only issue I have had with the service was when I didn’t know which city or suburb the business was in.  I think this is a great service and I look forward to using it more.

A feature I have wanted for a long time is to get emails about missed calls. I have a Blackberry and knowing that people are calling and hanging up before leaving a vm is very useful when I am out in the field. I wrote a small shell script to add this functionality to Asterisk.

I place the script in the h extension of the stdexten marco. The h extension triggers once a call is hung up from that context. The first and only priority for the h extension is a System() call. It calls this shell script and passes many parameters to it. The first parameter is the email address to send the email to. To make this work for the marco, I adjust the macro to have a third parameter which is email address. I would like to pull the email address from that extensions vm but that function does not exist and I could not figure out how to add that function in the C source code. If anyone knows a better way, please let me know. The script requires you have the mailx package installed.

• Download the script
• Rename the file processCallEmail.sh.
mv processCallEmail.txt processCallEmail.sh
• Put it in the /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin directory.
mv processCallEmail.sh /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/"
• Make sure the asterisk user has execute permissions on the script.
chmod 755 /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/processCallEmail.sh
• Add one line of documentation to macro-stdexten context on the line after ${ARG2}. ; ${ARG3} - email address to send emails about missed calls to
• Add the h extension line to the macro-stdexten context. exten => h,1,System(processCallEmail.sh "${ARG3}" "${CALLERID(num)}" "${CALLERID(name) }" "${DIALSTATUS}" "${VMSTATUS}")
• Alter the line that calls the macro to include an email address. exten => 500,1,Macro(stdexten,500,SIP/${EXTEN},abc@test.com)

Here is an example of an updated stdexten macro.
[macro-stdexten];
;
; Standard extension macro:
; ${ARG1} - Extension (we could have used ${MACRO_EXTEN} here as well
; ${ARG2} - Device(s) to ring
; ${ARG3} - email address to send emails about missed calls to
;
exten => s,1,AGI(ldaplookupphone2.agi)
exten => s,n,Dial(${ARG2},20) ; Ring the interface, 20 seconds maximum
exten => s,n,Goto(s-${DIALSTATUS},1) ; Jump based on status NOANSWER,BUSY,CHANUNAVAIL,CONGESTION,ANSWER)

exten => s-NOANSWER,1,Voicemail(${ARG1},u) ; If unavailable, send to voicemail w/ unavail announce
exten => s-NOANSWER,2,Goto(default,s,1) ; If they press #, return to start
exten => s-BUSY,1,Voicemail(${ARG1},b) ; If busy, send to voicemail w/ busy announce
exten => s-BUSY,2,Goto(default,s,1) ; If they press #, return to start
exten => _s-.,1,Goto(s-NOANSWER,1) ; Treat anything else as no answer
exten => a,1,VoicemailMain(${ARG1}) ; If they press *, send the user into VoicemailMain
exten => h,1,System(processCallEmail.sh "${ARG3}" "${CALLERID(num)}" "${CALLERID(name) }" "${DIALSTATUS}" "${VMSTATUS}")

Today I worked with the Asterisk function amd. Amd stand for answering machine detection and after my initial testing it seems to work very well. The documentation on the function is written very cryptically. I decided to just use the defaults and it worked amazingly well. For any auto dialing applications I highly recommend trying this function.

To help me get started I grabbed an example from the wiki and used an example from it. Here is the example from the wiki modified for Asterisk 1.4. I updated the wiki with the relevant 1.4 information.

[outbound]
exten => s,1,NoCDR
exten => s,n,AMD
exten => s,n,GotoIf($[${AMDSTATUS}=HUMAN]?humn:mach)
exten => s,n(mach),WaitForSilence(2500)
exten => s,n,Playback(message-when-machine)
exten => s,n,Hangup
exten => s,n(humn),WaitForSilence(500)
exten => s,n,Playback(message-when-human)
exten => s,n,Hangup

Today when I was reading an IBM RSS feed about Lotus Domino, I stumbled upon an interesting technote on how to recover documents from a corrupted Lotus Notes database. The technote first recommends you attempt the standard fixup, updall and compact. However if those don’t work, this is something else to try.

The process recommended is to write an agent that will attempt to copy each document in the database to a new database. The technote has sample code that you could easily copy and paste with only a couple of tweaks to the filenames. I have never had a database that needed this but being prepared could come in handy in an emergency.