om3ga.net

With the new Apple iPhone SDK 3.0 approaching I thought it would be interesting to start looking at developing applications for the device. I don’t own an iPhone, just the iTouch (8gb 2nd gen). Love the device - so nice to use; fast, responsive, featured and powerful (unlike a particular Windows Mobile device I got recently).

To actually develop applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, you require a Mac (or osx86… or other things I won’t mention). I was able to borrow an older iBook from someone, but turns out it doesn’t even start - no charger, and my car laptop charger didn’t seem to do the job. Besides the software would probably be too old. So I went out and got myself an iMac - I opted for this instead of the MacBook as it only cost a little more, and the specs were much higher (especially that screen!).

It took me a little while to get used to the Mac OS X operating system - its nice to use but like Windows, it has its quirks. I immediately swapped the included mouse for a much more responsive ($10) one, otherwise I’m sure I would have ripped that thing out and thrown it out the window! The SDK download took a while, was around 800mb I think. (By the way, the DMG files on Mac are very convenient… like a mix between Debian’s deb files and a windows installer).

For those who are accustom to languages like C++, Java and ones with similar syntaxes, best you prepare yourself for the hidious chaos that is Objective-C. Apparently a mix between C++ and Smalltalk, this language takes some features from both, and throws in a dash of Pascal, and some other languages. I’m still in the progress of learning the language, it’s easy enough once you get your mind around the hidious use of [square brackets] -minuses, +pluses and the like.

I recently bought an E-Box B202 from OnlineComputer, a shop who advertised the pc for $299 after a $40 discount. This pc would make a perfect home server, so I got one. It turns out the one I did recieve had a faulty hard drive, which failed within the first day of using it. But all was good, the guys at OnlineComputer swapped another for me.

Upon receiving my second one, I immediately installed Ubuntu Server. Clearly the e-box doesn’t have a disc drive, so I just used an external USB hard drive caddy - connected to a full sized PC DVD drive… worked good! Installation was painless, and within an hour I had a working Ubuntu Server install. I intended to use this thing as a X10 home automation server - which interfaced via USB/Serial port, to the pc controller, maybe more on that at a later time.

Ubuntu Server running on the E-Box

To test out how much power it had for general tasks, I installed a Left 4 Dead dedicated server. Turns out the e-box can handle a 4 player game easily! (I’m guessing same applies for 8 player). Ram usage for the game server is around 200mb at most, which is great with the e-box’s 1gb total memory. The XFCE GUI took up about 150mb memory, too.

Hosting Left 4 Dead on the E-Box

Left 4 Dead might be a bit more CPU intensive than other source games due to the Zombie AI, and since it can handle the game fine, games like TF2 would be even better. My latency when playing on my server was unusally high though (35ms or more, and I’m right next to it), this might be something to do with the e-box’s networking, the drivers, or the OS. Lastly the E-Box only uses about 15w of power when under load, so it can make a compact and feature-filled general purpose server.