Live From iBook!

Well, instead of posting an update, like I promised, I put together my old iBook and set it up as my new web server. My PC (850MHz Athlon in a tower case) sounds like a screeching banshee, so I moved to the quieter iBook.

I got my iBook in college (beginning of 2002) and spent a year of working off the loan for it. In September 2003 I thought it had died, so I convinced myself to buy a shiney, new 15″ Aluminum Powerbook (1.25GHz). It turned out I had only fried the power adapter, but my iBook would freeze whenever I slightly warped the case and the LCD screen’s backlight wouldn’t always turn on. There were problems with that model, and Apple had extended the warranty for it. Before the warranty was extended, I took it apart and canibalized the hard drive. I tossed around the idea of installing it in my car as a GPS/MP3/Kitchen Sink device, but it never materialized, since cleanly installing a computer would involve mucking around with the ignition and I just didn’t feel like accidently disabling my car.

Specs:
12″ iBook (Late 2001 Model)
500MHz G3
100MHz Bus
256MB RAM (May be upgrading to 640 soon)
20GB HDD @ 4200RPM (Will be putting my Athlon’s HDD in external Firewire enclosures to add on to iBook)

What’s great about the iBook is:
1.) It’s quiet. In fact, when the hard drive is spun down (in power save mode) it makes no noise whatsoever.
2.) It’s slim. It fits neatly on the top shelf on my desk under my network switch and Airport base station.
3.) It’s simple. Setting up the website and MovableType was a snap.

Speaking of configuring Mac OS X, it seems like I’m always finding something new and cool on Mac OS X that you just don’t find on Windows. A while ago, I discovered the Quartz Composer, which lets you generate 2-D and 3-D graphics using a simple, flow-chart-style programming language. It even accepts real-time inputs. Works great for VJ apps.

On Mac OS X Tiger, you can set up MovableType to use the Core Data framework to store its database information. Core Data impelements SQLite, a fully relational database system. Instead of running a massive database server, the SQLite runtime is linked by the application that uses it, thus becoming “part” of the application.

Neat!