Matthew Gast

Biography

Matthew Gast currently works for an advanced wireless network systems company in the Bay Area. Prior to that, he spent several years as an engineer for a series of network security companies. He is the author of 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, Network Printing, and T1: A Survival Guide.

Books

802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide by Matthew Gast Second Edition April 2005 $44.95 USD (Read Reviews)	802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide by Matthew Gast April 2002 OUT OF PRINT (Read Reviews)
T1: A Survival Guide by Matthew Gast August 2001 $39.99 USD (Read Reviews)	Network Printing by Matthew Gast , Todd Radermacher October 2000 $34.95 USD

Articles

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Out-Of-Office Processing with Asterisk
Publish Date: Sep. 19, 2006Matthew Gast explains how he set up his home Asterisk system to handle his out-of-office call processing needs. This detailed article includes the code Matthew used to allow and validate user input of the time and date for when out-of-office processing should be used. Building a MythTV Antenna System
Publish Date: Mar. 15, 2006Over-the-air reception with an antenna can be a maddening affair. TV signal strength can vary dramatically, especially indoors, and it can take a lot of tinkering to get an antenna system set up right. Matthew Gast walks you through his process of setting up a antenna system for digital reception. How Many Voice Callers Fit on the Head of an Access Point?
Publish Date: Dec. 13, 2005Matthew Gast develops a simple model to determine the maximum theoretical capacity of an access point to carry voice calls. MythTV Part 4: Tuning and Troubleshooting
Publish Date: Dec. 7, 2005It's certainly true that building a MythTV system is not for the faint of heart. In the course of his installation, Matthew Gast had four major problems to get through: two performance problems, one display problem, and one maddening mystery (solved). He tackles all four in this article. MythTV Part 3: Getting Quiet Enough for the Living Room
Publish Date: Nov. 2, 2005My MythTV system sits on top of the television in the living room, which means it's subject to much more rigorous noise standards than my other computers. While some fan noise is expected, the white noise is much more distracting when it comes from the home theater. Here's how I tackled this problem. Building My MythTV Box, Part 2: Software
Publish Date: Aug. 17, 2005A MythTV computer makes HDTV much better. In the first article in this series, Matthew Gast went through picking out the hardware for his new machine. Now, it's time to make the software work. Here are all the details. Mapping the 802.11 Protocol
Publish Date: May. 20, 2005A trip to London and a bit of unique inspiration gave Matthew Gast the ideas that would lead to the first draft of a visual map describing the relationship between the various components of the 802.11 standard and related security standards. Matthew details the road he took to the final version of his 802.11 protocol map. Matthew is the author of 802.11: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition. Top Ten 802.11 Myths of 2005
Publish Date: May. 2, 2005Are security and mobility really the keys to the design of wireless networks? Is 802.11n really on its way? Is 802.1X really too difficult to use? Matthew Gast debunks these and other 802.11 myths for 2005. Matthew is the author of 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition. Federated Network Authentication
Publish Date: Apr. 8, 2005How can academic network administrators cope with the "roaming scholar" problem--that is, users having to use several guest provisioning processes to roam across wireless networks on a campus? This challenge applies outside the university setting too. Matthew Gast shows you how federated network authentication can make roaming easier for users and admins alike. Digital TV without the Subscription
Publish Date: Oct. 14, 2004Terrestrial digital TV is traditional land-based antenna broadcast, as opposed to cable or satellite television. And it's free. You don't need to pay hefty subscription prices to enjoy quality digital TV, and Matthew Gast shows you how to set it up. Wireless Security and the Open1X Project
Publish Date: Sep. 21, 2004Open1X is an open source project focusing on network security. The wireless adoption of this technology is referred to as 802.1X. In this interview, Matthew Gast travels to the University of Utah to talk to Chris Hessing and Terry Simmons, who are intent on bringing standards-based wireless security to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows clients. When Is 54 Not Equal to 54? A Look at 802.11a, b, and g Throughput
Publish Date: Aug. 8, 2003According to the model, 802.11g is significantly faster than 802.11b. In a network consisting only of 802.11g clients, it is even slightly faster than 802.11a. However, "protection" mechanisms added to 802.11g to ensure backwards compatibility with legacy 802.11b clients can cut the throughput by 50 percent or more. Matthew Gast explains. Stop Acting Like the Entertainment Industry!
Publish Date: Jan. 17, 2003Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) are a new way to watch TV (TiVo is a popular example), but not necessarily in the friendly viewer-empowering way painted by the advertisements. DVRs offer increased functionality, but at what cost? Matthew Gast examines this emerging technology. A Dispatch from the Road: Margi Presenter-to-Go
Publish Date: Dec. 5, 2002Laptops are great for travel, but Pocket PCs are quickly gaining ground because they pack great functionality into small packages--you can even connect them to projectors for PowerPoint presentations. Matthew Gast takes his iPAQ on the road with Presenter-to-Go and generates as much interest in his setup as in his actual lecture. A Technical Comparison of TTLS and PEAP
Publish Date: Oct. 17, 2002Strong authentication is a key component of wireless LAN security. Matthew Gast, author of 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, looks at the latest wireless LAN authentication protocols.

Blog

ETel Coverage: Mark Spencer on the Future of Asterisk

March 02 2007

Jim has already beat me to writing about Mark Spencer’s talk on the future of Asterisk. A prior ETel presenter had noted that presentations in Japan begin with an apology. Mark is planning a trip to Japan in May, and began by apologizing for the voicemail system, and the queue/agent… read more

ETel coverage: OpenMoko

March 02 2007

One of the biggest draws for me to attend ETel was the Neo1973 and OpenMoko. My dissatisfaction with Apple for the closed platform on the iPhone means that I’m looking for an alternative. In addition to the “pure” interest I have in an open, customizable platform, I recently attended the Education… read more

ETel Coverage: Space, Time, and the Context of Internet Telephony

March 01 2007

Today, Moshe Yudkowsky talked about revolutions and what causes them. His basic contention was that revolutions result from taking systems apart to separate concepts or structures that were previously bundled. That may be in the area of authority (such as the way that user-generated and selected content led from static… read more

ETel Coverage: Funniest demo ever!

March 01 2007

Summer Bedard of NYU’s ITP program just showed off an Asterisk-driven queue program. Queue managers aren’t really that interesting because most of them operate on a FIFO basis, perhaps with levels of priority for a few different classes of service. In this queue manager, callers compete with each other for… read more

I wish Apple had taken on the telcos

February 17 2007

Anything that threatens the sacred cow of metered business, whether it’s minutes or bits you’re metering, is something that needs to be blocked at all costs by the telcos. Fortunately, the structure of the American mobile telephone industry gives them a solid way to play defense. Carriers buy the phones… read more

Hooking up Skype to Asterisk via SIP

October 30 2006

So far, the success of Skype within their walled garden of VoIP has been quite impressive. One of the more interesting things I’ve learned from my travels is that Skype is extremely popular in Asia (at least outside of Japan) so much that in many places, “Skype” is synonymous with… read more

Free telephone numbers with Internet Telephony Administrative Domains (ITADs)

October 17 2006

One of the reasons that I was late to VoIP was that the initial services just weren’t that exciting. (To be fair to myself, I probably wasn’t really that late. I just feel like it sometimes because so many of my friends were first-wave early adopters.) Another way to connect… read more

Extending MythTV recording space with LVM

May 13 2006

I dearly love my MythTV system. I travel a lot, and it enables me to take TV with me to 35,000 feet. What I love best is that it’s growing with me. I recently added an Air2PC HD5000 card, so I now have a three-tuner box. (I hope to write… read more

Quality of Service for Voice on the Interop Show Floor

May 05 2006

A month ago, I was staging the Interop Labs, with a particular personal focus on VoIP on 802.11. At that point, I promised to investigate what improvement Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) prioritization makes to voice quality. The Interop show floor is a terrible radio environment. From the Interop Labs booth, I… read more

Recording the Interop voice samples in Asterisk

May 05 2006

To record voice samples for the WMM comparison in my last post, I set up Asterisk for recording. I wound up using two approaches to this: a star code (*8) to preface extensions that indicated the call should be recorded, and an interactive voice demonstration. First, the star code: by prefacing… read more

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