Skype Hacks

Credits

About the Author

Andrew Sheppard has been fascinated by technology and science since childhood, and it’s an indulgence that has continued to this day.

Since discovering Skype in 2004, Andrew has been using and hacking Skype in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways—if Skype came with any sort of warranty, he voided it long ago! Although his initial foray into using Skype was to find ways to save money on his phone bill, the true potential of Skype’s ability to do things that no regular phone system can do soon overtook that initial interest and replaced it with a fascination and desire to see “how deep the rabbit hole goes” (to borrow some words from the movie The Matrix). He’s still burrowing!

Andrew is the publisher of a couple of online electronic magazines about Skype: Elpis’s Skype Power User Magazine (ISSN 1747-8421) and Elpis’s Skype API Developer Magazine (ISSN 1747-843X). The concept behind Elpis (http://www.elpispublishing.com/) is that knowledge, without the tools to take advantage of that knowledge, is rather powerless, while the converse is a path to empowerment. Elpis Publishing’s aim is to provide its readers with both the knowledge and the software needed to best use that knowledge: Knowledge + Tools = Empowerment.

After earning a first-class honor’s degree in astrophysics, Andrew made the mistake of going on to earn higher degrees: a master’s in astronomical technology at Edinburgh University (UK) and a master’s in business administration at the London Business School (UK). This period of time and that which followed was punctuated with work as a scientific researcher at Oxford University, as a software developer, and later, as a “Rocket Scientist” at Bankers Trust Company in the financial square mile of the city of London, as well as in New York and Tokyo. A lot of heartache and financial anguish could have been avoided throughout had he become what is clearly the optimal career choice for anyone anywhere: a master plumber. Nowhere on the planet is there a poor or unemployed master plumber! Too late to correct past follies, Andrew now makes his living writing software, and writing books and magazine articles.

Contributors and Reviewers

The following individuals contributed hacks, helped with hacks, or reviewed material for this book:

• Adam Harris (contributor and reviewer) is the number-one poster—by a wide margin—on the Skype forums. His knowledge and depth of expertise on Skype are second to none. Adam brought a rigor and passion for accuracy that raised the bar for the author and other contributors.

• Lawrence Hudson (reviewer) has been a pioneering user of various technologies for more years than he cares to remember. This has worked to his advantage, and to his disadvantage, throughout his career as a businessperson and entrepreneur. Nonetheless, his fascination and enthusiasm for all things technological remain. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his enthusiastic support for, and thorough review of, this book.

• Jason Terando (contributor) is the author of the ever-useful ActiveS component that you can use to interface applications with Skype on Windows. Many of the automation scripts in this book use ActiveS, so a great debt of thanks goes to Jason for making ActiveS so liberally available through a BSD-style license. You can download ActiveS from the KhaosLabs web site, http://www.khaoslabs.com/. Chapter 12 would not have been possible—or, at least, would be only a mere shadow of what it is—were it not for Jason.

• Theodore Wallingford (reviewer) is the author of the book VoIP Hacks (O’Reilly). Ted provided valuable feedback on early chapters of the book, and a whole lot of encouragement to do more! Not only is Ted an expert in VoIP technologies (http://www.macvoip.com/), but he’s also an enthusiastic and accomplished writer, having published an earlier work on VoIP, Switching to VoIP (O’Reilly).

• Kevin Delaney (contributor) is a cofounder of KhaosLabs and is an active member of the Skype forums.

Acknowledgments

Writing this book was a rather nightmarish experience. Not only is Skype moving faster than a speeding bullet, but it is also clearly a technology that needed to be written about, and written about in a timely fashion. This put quite a lot of pressure on me to write the book, but rather more on my family. To my son Nathaniel, who lost a whole summer with his dad because of the book, and to my wife Susan, who put up with being growled at from my computer keyboard in a hotel room in Hawaii while on vacation, all I can say is thanks, and that I hope to make it up to both of you.

Mike Loukides, my editor, was the inspiration for this book. When Mike suggested I write a book on Skype hacks, I didn’t know what a great undertaking the book would be, or how much I would learn from the experience. Nor, frankly, how much fun Skype as a technology would be. Mike was also (together with Lawrence Hudson, mentioned earlier) a constant pillar of support and encouragement, and was someone to bounce ideas off of during my early days before sitting down to write the book, when I was completely replacing my home phone system and otherwise hacking around with Skype.

Kelly Larabee at Skype was a joy to work with. She was very professional, and she cut through a lot of red tape to get the book reviewed by the Skype development team. Many thanks go to her, to Kat James, and to the team at Skype.

The Skype community who are active on the Skype user forums are a wonderful resource for anyone using Skype—and for authors of books on Skype, they are doubly so! Too numerous to mention by name, my thanks go out to all the regular, and irregular, posters to the Skype forums. Special mention goes to Bill Campbell and the Skype Journal (http://www.skypejournal.com/), for his encouragement during the writing of this book and for his insights into the world of Skype.

I’ve been enamored with O’Reilly as a publisher since the days of its X-Windows book series, and I’ve been a constant reader of all things O’Reilly since then. So, when the opportunity to actually write for O’Reilly came about, I felt both flattered and privileged by the opportunity. The crew at O’Reilly didn’t disappoint. In terms of both the caliber of the staff and their professionalism, O’Reilly made Skype Hacks a reality in record time.

Lastly, in the final analysis, all authors must shoulder the responsibility for their work. So, any errors or omissions that remain in this book are not from want of effort to remove them, but are the result of the fallibility of the author. However, I do make the commitment that I will share any such errors or omissions that are brought to my attention with all readers of this book, through its web site, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/SkypeHacks/index.html. This is also the place to check for errata and updates to code listings.