Brent Stace’s Weblog

Well, the birth of a new machine for me at least…

Friday at work I found a ye olde Blue and White G3 online for about $100. Why do you ask that I may need this computer? 1 reason really, I want it as a server computer . It will be my new computer to serve my mp3’s and video’s. This is not really b/c I’m geeky and I wanna do something cool; there is a purpose here. As my setup stands now, I have a laptop connected to 2 external hard drives. These external hard drives hold my mp3’s and videos. But, when I want to move my computer to….oh say the couch, I have to unplug from my HD’s losing my access to music and video’s. So, how am I supposed to listen to music in my room while doing work? Well, my iPod would be my only way, but I don’t wanna wear headphones all day long, be limited in my music collection (since my iPod doesn’t hold all my music (yet)), or buy one of those expensive speaker systems to dock the ipod into, where I won’t even be able to see what’s playing from across the room/apartment. So, my laptop will connect to the server, mount it as a disk, add/remove just like a HD, but it’s remote and highly portable. Once it is set up correctly, It’ll be perfect. I looked at other options like airtunes, but that has no way to control the music really and the NAS (network attached storage) option required the format of the disk to change, and it seemed that I’d be losing a sense of control with that system, not to mention a lack of support by needing to hack the NAS. I figure I’ll throw on a VNC server on the new computer in case I need to change things once it is set up, OS X 10.4 (there are ways to get around the DVD OS X requirement :-p), Apple’s remote desktop I got for free @ WWDC 2004, and, of course, the necessary program for a Mac file server, SharePoints for outrageous (and free!) AFP/SMB control.

Just one more thing left…What should I name it?

For all of the probably 2 people who read this AND care about a universal binary…I’ve made a universal binary of my program Decider. And…now for the people who really don’t care…Since I don’t have an intel mac, I couldn’t test the universal binary on an intel mac. However, I did build with no warnings or errors…on the second build (and only after a clean.) The only thing that showed on the first build after a clean was this warning:
warning suggest use of -bind_at_load, as lazy binding may result in errors or different symbols being used
I’ve looked it up, and apparently it’s related to standard libraries from Apple/UNIX. So, without testing and since there are no warnings/errors to be concerned about (after a second build), it should work.
The program should be up for download shortly after this blog entry is posted.
As a side note, the code required NO changes to be UB compliant, and the size difference between the UB and the PPC is about 10K (the UB being bigger of course).