iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

It’s a good thing that I had a good weekend, because today I chipped my fake tooth on a peice of candy (Isn’t that always the story?). I’ve got a dentist appointment for Thursday, and we’ll see where things go from there.

Check the picture, back of the tooth, left of your screen (right of my face) at the gum line.

This tooth is actually 1/2 fake, the root is there, but it’s been capped since I was in grade six.

I hope it’s an easy fix (but I doubt it).

UPDATE: Apparently I just need some arcylic filler to seal my crown to my tooth — should only take thirty minutes too. We’ll see how it goes.

I saw Billy Corgan at the Carlu in Toronto on Saturday. What can I say, the man can do no wrong. I’ll admit the sound isn’t that great in the Carlu, the two opening acts were OK (the sound didn’t help) and he never introduced his backing band (which are on his website). But when it’s time to Rock, Billy delivers.

The set list was basically his new album, with an AC/DC cover for an encore. The album sounds even better live, largely because the driving synth drums make the experience more like a club than a performance. The stage show was impressive with metal work art used for the instrument stands and an iTunes visualization style background presented on a wall of light cells, 200 by 700 – ish, that could project about 256 colours each. Speaking of Apple projects, out of one of those sculpted steal instrument stands sprung a iMac G5 which keyboarder Brian Liesegang worked with. Matt Walker is back touring with Billy and the final piece of Billy’s backing band was Linda Strawberry lindastrawberry.com who keeps a very interesting tour blog (“David Bowie told us to listen to the Arcade Fire” — “lunch with Robert Smith was cool”).

I’m not sure that I can give a review so much as I can just say it was a very postive experience: exciting, exhilarating and comfortably familiar. Billy is on my list with Neil Young of artists I have to see whenever I can, and he won over Neil’s appearance in Barrie at Live 8 Canada, so to offer a review of a show that I’d unconditionally attend is a little disingenuous. All I can say is it was an amazing show and you should catch it when it comes to your town (or at least the David Letterman performance on BillyCorgan.com).

I made a post on Slashdot last night in response to a question about laptop security. The question was about Windows XP and I was only able to shared what I do on my UNIX based laptops (My PowerBook) — some how that got marked as a Troll. In any event, I got an eMail about my post:

I am curious, i’m soon to buy a Powerbook with interest of delving deeper into OSX than what the iMacs and Powermacs on my campus (www.purdue.edu) will allow me to do, and saw your blurb on the laptop security. I was hoping you’d give me a brief explaination of what’s goign on there, i understand you’re quietly appending a text file, but not sure with what and to what end. I would like to employ a similar setup with my system, that’s why i’m asking 🙂

Here’s what I had to share:

I got this running a few years ago, but I saw it in 2600 Magazine about 3 issues ago. The basic idea os your machine automatically calls up a web site with a unique name every hour. If your Laptop gets nicked you can hopefully check the logs on your server and trace it back to an ISP and hopefully they can tell you who has your laptop. That might not work so well, so what I would do is try to regain control over it while it’s online — I may not be able to get it come back to me like professor Frink’s autodialer, but I can at-least erase my files (another tip – turn on filevault) and use the say command to taunt the guy (you can type ‘ say go to hell ‘ in the terminal and the Mac will say whatever you tell it to).

OSX is the best part about a Mac, and one of it’s best features is it’s base of a UNIX-type operating system, named Darwin. UNIX/Linux/FreeBSD/Darwin all make use of a number of common, free, open source, tools for the basics of the operating system. One of these tools that all UNIXs share is a tool called cron that is used for scheduling tasks. Each user can schedule tasks, so long as they can edit their ‘crontab’ with the proper syntax. Here’s more info on cron: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron

One thing you will need, as the writer on Slashdot implied, is a web site with access to the logs. These logs show you who visited, the IP number, and what web browser they used. Without another machine with a web server, with logs you can read, this won’t work.

OK, so you’ve got your new shinny PowerBook setup and every thing else. Open the Terminal (Spotlight can find it for you) and type:

crontab -e

(for edit the crontab – in my example I fed in the -l for list my crontab )

Note – if there is no menu on the bottom read the *

Now you need to enter when this is to run, using the ancient standard for cron tabs: minute, hour, day of the month, month, day of the week. You can use wild cards like * to mean anything in this field is OK. So for the first minute of every hour forever enter:

1 * * * * 

after the time you need to enter in the command you want, in this case we want to use curl, a tool for getting files off the web. We want to tell it -s for be silent -f for fail silently and -A for append user agent, this is so you can have in your web server logs a user agent you’ll notice – like “My Laptop”, or in my case, “PowerMatt” and just to make this all REALLY silent, -o to send the output to the null device at /dev/null. You want this to execute silently so you don’t logs full of curl’s output. The last field is the URL to hit, so make someplace on your website that’ll be unique. That ONE line entry in your crontab should look like this now:

1 * * * *  curl -sfA    'My Laptop' -o /dev/null http://www.mattclare.ca/right_here/

Now hit ctl+X to quit, it’ll prompt you to save, say yes, and it should say that the crontab was installed successfully. Now just check those web logs and you should see your machine calling in once an hour.

In my example, I had

1 * * * * nice -n 19 curl -sfA    'PowerMatt' -o      /dev/null http://www.mattclare.ca/right_here/ 

which was just an extra call to the nice application. It just tells the PC scheduler that this process is willing to play nice with others and allow them to go first, to the power of 19 (the max).

* If you don’t see an editor with a menu at the bottom then you don’t have nano as your default editor, you have vi. Which shouldn’t happen based on what I know about the default OSX setup, but just in case type :q to quit vi. Then type export EDITOR=nano. That’ll get you back on track — Google for the perminant fix.

Hope that helps, and thanks for the opportunity to share some knowledge.

I flew into Calgary, grabbed a rental car, and went camping in Banff and Jasper. Sunday night I made it into Edmonton and stayed at the University of Alberta for the Canadian WebCT Users Conference.

While I was out in Alberta there was a lot of flooding going on, but it went south to north, as did I, about a day in advance. It wasn’t until I was in Edmonton when the floods caught up with me. Edmonton’s main river, the North Saskatchewan river, is in a valley, so the impact of the river rising was very limited.

I’ve posted pictures of the whole trip, including some flood pictures at the end. mattclare.ca/alberta2005

Last Wednesday I left Toronto for Alberta. I flew WestJet to Calgary and camped there (before the floods) and then went off to Banff and then Jasper national parks. I’m in Edmonton now and will be until Wednesday when the WebCT Conference I’m here to attend wraps up.

I took lots of pictures while I was in the two parks and I plan on spending the flight home trimming the 500 pics down to something people would actually be interested in.

*The picture above was taken at 10:45PM mountain time.