So today we got a new phone system at work, and all got new Cisco 7940 series phones. Aparently they don't plug into regular phone jacks, they use a network cable instead, which made us ponder, what can this thing do?

A little searching and we've found the answer. The phones actually come w/ a small webserver in them, and each have their own IP address. A few more searches and we came up with a dev kit for the phones. 20 mintues later and we installed our own server for our dept phones and rerouted all our IP's to that server instead of the main one. Then it was just a matter of figuring out what we could add to our phones.

The first was easy, we made a directory list for our dept, for quick dialing. Since it all sits on our own server, we can update it in one spot and it updates all of our records for us. But then the fun really started when we found out how to add images! Now we have Drunk Homer phone!! Aparently we can add any images we want to our nice big LCD screen. We're going to try working on animating them.

Next up is adding new ring tones. That's shouldn't be hard, we just need a 2 second .wav file, and we'll all be able to use some really annoying new tones to piss off everyone else (especially frustrating to others since nobody else can access them except us). Let the Mario Bros ring commence!

We also tried to crash the phone, or screw it up. I set my phone to automatically forward all incoming calls to Eric and he sent all his to mine. Nate then called one of us and the phone just beeped like mad. Fun recursion! Then Nate found a hack online, to send a ping to our phones that is an illegal instruction and makes the phone crash. Woohoo!

All the interface is in XML so there's actually something useful we can do with this, like add in XML feeds from our website into our phone display if we wanted. All in all, I thought these phones were a bit of overkill when we got them, and in fact they are, but it turns out that's a good thing. ;)