telagent

an HTTP agent for placing and receiving telephone calls

This telagent integrates telephones as resources in the web, using the tel: scheme; see Real-Time Resources in the Web for details; the basic idea is:

1. your web user agent should handle a link to W3C's MIT office phone ^(NS) kinda like a mailbox link: offer to dial to it.
2. caller-id should make the phone a little more like email: you can tell who it's from before you answer it, and you can answer it any time later with one click.

Start it going ala:

python telAgent.py /dev/ttyS3 491-0501 8501 ~/.phoneLog >~/.phoneHTTPlog

and it will

• open a connection to the modem (/dev/ttyS3) and log caller-id info
• listen on port 8501 for HTTP requests:
  • GET / shows a log of the caller-id info with
    • incoming numbers linked to their tel: addresses for easy call-back
    • additional info about the area code
  • GET tel:... shows an offer (a form) to dial to that phone; for north american numbers, it shows timezone info and, based on that, the current time there.
  • POST /dialer with dialAs and target args dials the phone (and writes a log entry)
  • POST /dialer with an empty dialAs hangs up the phone

TODO

• let incoming calls spawn new windows:
  • turn incoming caller-id info into HTTP POST events that you can subscribe to (ala KnowNow)
  • an HTTP agent that responds to POST requests by bringing up web pages on the desktop.
• along with "dial this number" requests, support "... and start recording the resulting conversation"; in general, handle follow-up after dialing
• load (some of) the caller-id log from disk on start-up, and purge some of it from memory after a while.
• for the phone log: write an RDF schema for it; write a parser that treats it like RDF syntax.

Bugs/Limitations

Netscape, unfortunately, doesn't support proxying tel:... URIs; in fact, it doesn't recognize them as absolute URIs. You can, however, (ab)use the urn: proxy support; try this automatic proxy configuration for urn:tel: URIs (i.e. in the Netscape preferences under Advanced/Proxies, point your "Configuration location (URL)" there; or copy it to your local disk etc.), and then try W3C's MIT office phone, rigged with netscape work-around.

My tel: handler is limited to localhost (127.0.0.1); I haven't figured out a good way to get the absolute URI of the dialer to the right parts of the code.

There's an abstract TelnumNav class for figuring out what digits to call to get from this phone to the phone identified by some URI; the subclass I've implemented is the rules for dialing from 913 in Kansas (which is pretty much like any place else in the U.S., except for 816 numbers).

Architecture and Requirements

python

tested with python 1.5.2 (@@link to debian package)

pyXML stuff

python-xml

what I use: debian package ii python-xml 0.5.1-5 XML tools for Python

XMLElement.py, XMLWriter.py

my own implementation of namespaces and a little bit of DOM

medusa

Sam Rushing's cooperative multi-tasking server architecture

I just downloaded medusa-src-20000601.tar.gz and unpacked it and then used

PYTHONPATH=/medusa's/parent/dir python ...

to help python find it

update Dec 2002: medusa-0.5.3.tar.gz from amk's updated medusa

Acknowledgements and References

conversation with David Boles... JWZ's caller-id thingy...

found cid 17Dec2000; it's a client/server caller-id thingy in python

• URLs for Telephone Calls, A. Vaha-Sipila , April 2000
• tel: in An Index of WWW Addressing Schemes
• modems.com -- Extended AT Command Sets
  Fri, 31 Jul 1998 21:06:12 GMT
• Zoom Telephonics: Dualmode Zoom/FaxModems 56K, 56Kv, and 56Kx
  Thu, 01 Jun 2000 12:31:55 GMT

Dan Connolly
$Revision: 1.4 $ of $Date: 2002/12/31 22:33:52 $ by $Author: connolly $