zen.org Communal Weblog

Tonight Patrick was in the livingroom with his empty cup sitting on the table. He’d finished a half a glass of sparkling water (“bubbles”), and now decided he needed more. He told his Mom as much, but she knew he shouldn’t have any more and declined the request. Patrick made a couple of further demands, resorting to begging but still no luck. Disappointed, he stopped trying.

Well, until I entered the room.

“Dad,” he said to me, his eyes wider than should be possible, “I want some more bubbles.”

I looked over at his Mom questioningly, and she said, “No, Patrick, I told you that was enough for tonight.”

As I glanced back to Patrick, his face was the image of mischief brewing at a low temperature. “Daaaaaad,” he did in his best falsetto, like a kid in a classroom trying to cheat with his buddy at the next desk, “I want more bubbles.” The whispers were almost too quiet to hear. Almost.

I shook my head. “Noooooooooo,” I whispered back. We’re both within a couple of feet of Mom, who’s sitting right next to him on the couch.

“Patrick!” his Mom exclaimed. “You know I said you couldn’t, and now I caught you trying anyway!”

He gave a foolish grin and launched his head (gently) over into her side. “Mommm…”

So this is where it all starts, playing one against the other and trying to trip us up. This is going be a kick.

Today I followed some great instructions on how to put OpenZaurus on my Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. It worked like a charm! The Opie GUI is pretty slick, fast, and easy. And the initial image gives you a console window you can use to actually have a command prompt. 🙂

The plan is to try to make it take over DHCP & DNS services, at least, for our home network. Heh.

Update: So far so good. DHCP is working just fine, and maradns, the OpenZaurus choice instead of BIND, is nice and fast and slim for all DNS, including recursive lookups of random domains (i.e., Web traffic is behaving fine). Yippee! The little Zaurus is on my desk, doing most of the work of the 265MHz old box humming away in the corner. You could put hundreds of the Zaurus (Zauri?) in the space taken by the old server. And we’ll talk later about the power consumption dropping to 5 watts/2 amps, compared to the PC’s 230W power supply with spinning disks, whirring fans, and far more live motherboard circuits…