In the SqueakNews e-zine we will feature a question every month and choose and publish selected answers on the site. "The editor's choice" will even get a surprise present. I would like to be able to post these questions to the list.

This month's question is an actual event that happened, and goes as follows:

Just before going on a business trip, a fellow Squeaker found out that his house had just been broken into and intruders had apparently fled minutes ago without being able to touch anything. He was annoyed, but had to leave house quickly again for his trip. He had a small portable alarm laying around and his house had a permanent cable-Internet connection. Before leaving, he mounted and turned on the the alarm, and wrote about 15 lines of Squeak code that would determine if the alarm was set off and would send him an email indicating that the alarm was on. In that short time he had no way of physically connecting that portable alarm to his computer.  The warning would need to be reasonably quick and accurate so
that intruders wouldn't have a chance to silence it before he was notified, and he could depend on it to call the police or inform friends to check the house from wherever he was. He also wanted to get a "heart beat" email every 10 minutes so that he would know that his computer was alive (bear in mind that's a lot of messages a day). In the 15 minutes he had before leaving he managed to do all of that with enough time for testing and even printing stickers to warn intruders.

Can you guess what did he do and how he did it?

ps: He found this utility so useful he still uses it whenever he is away from home. Later he slightly modified the utility to increase the frequency of heartbeats and send email messages to a special mailbox. He then wrote another utility for his laptop to check that special mailbox every minute and warn him if there were heartbeats missing, or if there was an alarm raised. He extended this utility to check his web site and warn him if that site goes down as well, and now dreaming of connecting a webcam and picturing intruders, but that's another story. You don't need to do this part, but if you like a challenge who are we to stop you?

Please send your answers with code snippets directly to me as we don't want to clutter the list more than it is now. To be able to be included in the current issue answers must reach to us by 27th June. Sorry for the short notice, next month we will have more time.

Cheers

Tansel Ersavas
Editor, Squeak News
http://www.squeaknews.com