Another month flies by.
I often whinge about having tno time to do anything, but things are really starting to come to a head now.
The wedding is just three weeks ago and there are still quite a few preparations to be made. I don’t have any weekends left, though, as friends from overseas will be starting to arrive on the west coast soon, before making their way eastwards for the wedding at the end of the month.
To distract myself from the pain of impending domesticity, I treated myself to a Sharp Zaurus PDA. What a nice little thing, this is.
It was a bit of a hassle to get my low-power Socket Wi-Fi card up and running on my WLAN. This required cross-compiling a new kernel on my laptop and flashing the ROM of the Zaurus, which was a little nerve-wracking, considering it was the very first thing I did with my unit.
Since then, I’ve been cross-compiling cool applications like Kismet and adding essentials like OpenSSH, rsync, wireless-tools, Perl and Ruby. It’s very cool to have a Ruby and Perl interpreter in my pocket wherever I go.
Syncing with the desktop required a kernel patch to get the peer-to-peer IP over USB working with the totally unsupported Qtopia software for Linux, but it worked without too much arsing around.
In conclusion, the Zaurus is an awesome little toy and I even find it useful for actual work, but it’s probably too complicated for the masses. It locks up with alarming frequency when installing new applications and performing other operations. In addition, really exploiting the coolness of the thing requires pulling up a bash prompt on the thing and dicking around in config files. Anyone without Linux knowledge (or a very strong desire to quickly acquire it) would be swimming at this point.
Anyway, as practically every minute of my time from now until the wedding is spoken for, I’ll quit this diary entry and go and do something more productive instead, like write my speech. Ugh!