Tue, 27 Jun 2006 19:20:18 -0300
We first tried to catch a train on the Wednesday, the day before Astricon started. Unfortunately we were struck by two problems, firstly the money transferred to my credit card hadn’t yet arrived and secondly, there was a strike on the TGV train which runs from Torino to Paris. Seeing as I was not expected to speak until Friday, we accepted the defeat and attempted to go for a train on Thursday. Various problems ensued through the day, leaving us with one remaining train which was to leave at 9:30pm that night.
Finally it seemed that we had everything organized and that we would be able to make it in time for the train without any problems. After finding out that my colleagues from GEDAM would be unable to join me on the journey, we nonetheless continued preparations. I said my goodbyes and left in time to arrive at the train station over an hour early. Again we were beset by difficulties. The journey would require 3 changes, the first of which required a rather tight window and needed everything to work perfectly.
Unfortunately, for reasons unknown to me, the first train of the series was delayed by 35 minutes making the change for the second train impossible.
It now seemed almost impossible that we would be able to make it on time to Astricon in order to make my speech. Flights at that short notice were going to cost in the region of 900 Euros!
The only possibility was to get my speech delayed to 1pm and to catch the first available TGV.
Upon arriving I managed to meet up with everyone and found my speech had been successfully delayed. I took a few photos and walked around the conference hall before watching a couple of speeches and then making my own (which had been finalized on the train between Italy and France).
A couple of notable speeches were Jared Smith’s speech on voice recognition and text to speech, and David Zimmer’s speech on large scale Asterisk deployments.
Jared spoke about the new speech recognition integration in the latest versions of the Asterisk Business Edition, which really look a lot simpler than the Sphinx integration I had done in the past. Jared had a pleasant manner of speaking which also made it enjoyable for my partner, who came with me and knew very little about Asterisk.
David Zimmer spoke about a rather large scale Asterisk implementation which even eclipsed some of the larger predictive dialing customers we are currently working with. He mentioned some interesting points on using MySQL clusters and the Linux Virtual Server Project. He also split Asterisk and the various components into multiple layers so as to have redundancy and low CPU usage on each box.
I spoke about creating software with C# to integrate with Asterisk including creating a softphone, creating Asterisk manager applications and accessing the realtime database from C#.
Some interesting products were on show from Xorcom who appear to have larger scale channel banks now available for Asterisk – I will update you on further details as soon as they become available.
I only managed to speak very briefly with Mark Spencer and Kevin Fleming as I was in a bit of a rush, having arrived late.
It was however well worth the time, and well worth repeating.
All in all it was a good Astricon, with the usual excess of new contacts and business proposals
Hope to see you all at the next Astricon!
