Everything you *never* wanted to know about IR protocols

During the week, Lindsay bought an ancient Sharp Zaurus 5000 off eBay, and we've spent a few hours (OK, I spent 3 hours watching the cricket and troubleshooting) trying to get my somewhat futuristic Fujitsu ultra-lightweight notebook talking to the Zaurus over the IR port.

I've discovered several things in this time. Did you know there are at least 7 (yes, seven) IR protocols from the last 15 years. IRdA, ASK, etc etc etc. And you guessed it, the Zaurus will only speak one protocol (ASK), and modern PCs only have a clue about IRdA. And the only way to attempt to load ancient drivers for IR ports is to interupt the win2k/winXP installation process? Sooooooo ... this leaves me building a null-modem cable to plug into PCMCIA modem cards to build a link between the two beasts (which at least speak PCMCIA ... but not Linear Flash, oh no, Chairman Bill dropped that for Windoze 2k), and resurrecting the XMODEM stuff I used 15 ***years*** ago. If you know what I mean when I say "Kermit", you'll understand my frustration.

At least we found a web page from a guy who built his own bluetooth adapter for the Zaurus. In his own words "If your happy fabricating non-trivial ICBs, you shouldn't have any problem with this". I'll save that for after the "nailing jelly to the ceiling" episode.

Or I could just boot to linux and see what's possible there :-)