Well, with the remaining trust available at this point you might just as well use something cryptographically secure, like encrypted ones, twos, or simple HMACs of the block number.
A too-simple scheme is likely to be detected (and bypassed!) by the firmware a nearly no time.
Try http://xpra.org/ - that's a "gnu screen" for X11, but bandwidth-optimized, can also relay USB, audio, ...
Just to give you an idea: I used it for forwarding a Firefox window across an UMTS connection when sitting in a train. (Long story: 32bit Java required to remote desktop into a client's environment across the Atlantic, ugh.)
Well, a simple solution is to only have one middleware that uses database connections, and have all other things around it be purely functional. (Though that may mean using their own databases, of course).
Even just a random process might give better results - sometimes.
From THHGTTG:
> To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
Well, using "himem.sys" you could make use of RAM above 1MB... I used it to write a sort utility that only uses temp files when RAM was exhausted.
On my 386 with 4MB total RAM I could use about 3.7 or so, the rest was a shadowed BIOS copy. (Never tried to deactivate that, perhaps it would have been relocated and then made available?)
That's not so tiny... 256 Bytes RAM, 4K Flash, that's quite a bit bigger than the smaller ATtiny25 (128B RAM, 2K Flash, 6 I/O, much less hardware on board)