As usual when I find something new, it goes a bit overboard. I always wanted to delve into learning the Perl programming language. So I took this opportunity to use it to write a small plug-in for my Asterisk server. As soon as somebody calls, my script goes to a Swedish directory service and looks up the name. It then puts it in the callerID information so the name shows up on my phones. It also connects to my satellite receiver and displays a message on my tv so I know who is calling. Pretty nifty. Naturally I found that someone already written this in php, and that they’ve used the wap version of the lookup page to find the name. That preserves a lot of bandwidth so I’ll probably rewrite my program to use that instead. Anyway, Perl is an amazing language.
My next addition will be to add a swedish weather service to my PBX.