Minor triumphs

[mdlbear]

Last night chaoswolf came down from her room to play me "Banks of the Ohio", the first actual song in her book, on her new guitar. Her grin of triumph was a joy to see; she's been having trouble wrapping her head around musical notation, and her muscle memory hasn't kicked in yet. But she's getting it.

At work, we've been looking for a small, handheld device to run my little server on. The Palm Tungsten C looked perfect, for a while, but it wouldn't run my code without at least a recompile, and almost certainly editing the source to make it use the J2ME (Java 2 "Micro Edition" -- that's marketing-speak for "crippled") classes. And I couldn't make IBM's development environment environment install on my Debian system -- it's specialized for RH8 (which is ancient), and hangs somewhere before it installs its stupid licensing stuff.

Wednesday morning our shipment from Crossbow arrived, with a pair of Stargate development kits. This is a 400MHz Xscale-based Linux board that can easily hide under a playing card. It shipped with a free Java runtime called Wonka that had apparently been trimmed somewhat by the Crossbow folks; dropping back to the version available on the Wonka site finally gave me a working mini-server at about 5:30 yesterday evening. Happy geek.

Comments

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

You might also check out the Soekris. Dunno if it's too big - but it's certainly going to run what you need.

(Or, the Nano-ITX should be out Any Minute

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You might also check out <A HREF="http://www.soekris.com">the Soekris</A>. Dunno if it's too big - but it's certainly going to run what you need.

(Or, the Nano-ITX should be out Any Minute<SUPtm</SUP>.)

[mdlbear]

In this case, the smaller the better, and it has to run for several hours on battery power. Anyway, the Stargate was just what we needed.