Details:

• OS: Gentoo Linux (what else? )
• Running programs: KDE 4, Konqueror, Thunderbird (fetching mail via IMAPS every 5 minutes)
• Conditions:
  • Wireless connection to Internet, shell script kills and reloads Konqueror with three websites every two minutes (emulating a user who browses the WWW).
  • Display set to lowest brightness level, screensaver / standby / etc. deactivated so that it was switched on all the time

Data capturing:

The ‘remaining capacity’ value from /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state and a timestamp were written to a file every minute:

#!/bin/bash
LOG="/home/pn/batterylog"
echo "Battery log, started $(date)" >$LOG
while ((1))
do
  TIME=$(date "+%s")
  REMAINING=$(grep "remaining capacity" /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state | cut -b 26- | cut -d' ' -f1)
  echo "$TIME $REMAINING" >> $LOG
  sync
  sleep 60
done

Results:

The battery lasted a little longer than 4 hours and 50 minutes which means approx. 6.7 watts average power consumption while browsing the web over WLAN.
This time I decided to use OpenOffice Calc to create the graph - here is a screenshot of it:

(And here is the spreadsheet, if you’re interested: Dell Mini battery consumption log (Spreadsheet))

See my bug report in Mozilla’s bug tracker if you want to read the whole story. You can even watch a screen video of the crash there

Anyway… go ahead and download it, it’s a good piece of software. I tried out beta3 and the RCs, and I like the new version so much, that I’m now using Firefox as my default browser again (after more than two years with Konqueror as my default browser).

Nice birthday present by the way, Mozilla! Thanks!

### GPRS ###

config_ppp0=( “ppp” )

link_ppp0=”/dev/rfcomm0″

pppd_ppp0=(
“noauth” # Do not require the peer to authenticate itself
“debug”
“local” # Ignore carrier detect signal from the modem

“defaultroute” # Make this PPP interface the default route
“usepeerdns” # Use the DNS settings provided by PPP

“lcp-echo-interval 15″ # Send a LCP echo every 15 seconds
“lcp-echo-failure 3″ # Make peer dead after 3 consective
# echo-requests

“lock” # Lock serial port
“115200″ # Set the serial port baud rate
“crtscts” # Enable hardware flow control
)

chat_ppp0=”
ABORT BUSY
ABORT ERROR
ABORT ‘NO ANSWER’
ABORT ‘NO CARRIER’
ABORT ‘NO DIALTONE’
ABORT ‘Invalid Login’
ABORT ‘Login incorrect’
” AT
TIMEOUT 5
OK ‘ATH’
OK ‘ATE1′
OK ‘AT+CGDCONT=1,\”IP\”,\”cmnet\”‘
OK ‘ATD*99#’
TIMEOUT 60
CONNECT ”
TIMEOUT 5
~– ”
“

But…

The upload horribly failed after the 3rd folder or so, with no error message whatsoever. No matter what I tried, it would just fail silently. The debug logging (see Debugging/Thunderbird article in the Dovecot wiki) didn’t help, and neither did dovecot’s log on the server. The problem seems to be connected with creating folders on the server somehow - because uploading a big amount (400 for a small test) mails within one folder wasn’t a problem. I couldn’t find out if Thunderbird or dovecot is to blame here…

I eventually managed to get this big pile of mail to the server by using a perl script that I found on perlmonks.org. Thanks to Davis for providing this! I downloaded it, installed the Mail::MboxParser and Mail::IMAPClient dependencies (with two ‘cpan install …’ calls), changed the configuration in the script to our site’s data and ran it. ~30 minutes later, the mails were on the server. Only thing that could have been better: All mails were ‘marked as unread’ - but that’s easy to fix.

Update:
After looking into the perl code, I found a way to ‘mark as read’ during the transfer. I posted it under the original perlmonks.org script as a comment.

• I can access it from multiple hosts at once
• I can use one unified user interface for all instant messenger protocols and IRC
• I can access the platform even through my mobile phone via GPRS / WLAN
• I have logs of all communications in one central place

This is how a few free software components work together to make it possible:

Overview (OpenDocument format)

Or as PNG file (rendered with GIMP):

Add the following rules to your iptables ruleset, and make sure it’s at the beginning (before the restrictions):

iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT

Situation: We were working on a piece of documentation consisting of multiple HTML files using frames. It was planned to burn this directory structure to a CD, and the CD would then be delivered to the customer.

While checking the docs for browser compatibility, we found out, that on some computers (I still don’t know the pattern… all running Windows XP SP2, although some of them have a chinese language version, some of them have an english language version installed) the left navigation frame just didn’t work, as in nothing happened when clicking on the links. The linked URLs were correct, the files existed, but the browser in question (Internet Explorer) just didn’t open them. BUT: This happened only, when the html files were stored on the local hard drive. When we accessed them via SAMBA on a network share, everything was fine! In Firefox it worked perfectly fine from everywhere.
After a lot of searching, following wrong assumptions and so on, I found out, that when I accessed the docs on the local hard drive, Internet Explorer switched to ‘Unknown zone (mixed)’. When accessing them on the SAMBA share, Internet Explorer always showed ‘Internet’ zone. I tried to find out what could trigger Internet Explorer to do that, but didn’t find anything useful. Due to closed source and no debugging possibilities I didn’t see any way to find it out on my own.
Another couple of hours later, I converted the HTML file containing the navigation menu from DOS/Windows style line breaks (\r\n) to UNIX style line breaks (\n) with ‘dos2unix’. I did this, because I wanted to use sed on my Linux system to remove a big amount of empty lines in the file (I’d like to know how they got there in the first place, but that’s another story).
And suddenly it worked. From local disk. I couldn’t believe it at first, and converted the file back to UNIX style (using ‘unix2dos’), and it stopped working again, so I was sure it was this change what caused the bug to not being triggered anymore.
So to sum up: we have to convert one of the HTML files (which were generated on a Windows machine) in the package (consisting of hundreds of files) from Windows style line breaks to UNIX style line breaks to make the whole thing work on a Windows target system.

And who may I thank for all of this? Beloved Microsoft Corporation.

(assuming Bluetooth works)

### GPRS ###

config_ppp0=( "ppp" )

link_ppp0="/dev/rfcomm0"

pppd_ppp0=(
        "noauth"        # Do not require the peer to authenticate itself
        "nomagic"
        "debug"
        "local"         # Ignore carrier detect signal from the modem

        "defaultroute"  # Make this PPP interface the default route
        "usepeerdns"    # Use the DNS settings provided by PPP

        "lcp-echo-interval 15"  # Send a LCP echo every 15 seconds
        "lcp-echo-failure 3"    # Make peer dead after 3 consective
                                # echo-requests

        "lock"                          # Lock serial port
        "115200"                        # Set the serial port baud rate
        "crtscts"                       # Enable hardware flow control
)

chat_ppp0=(
        'TIMEOUT' '5'
        'ECHO' 'ON'
        'ABORT' '\nBUSY\r'
        'ABORT' '\nERROR\r'
        'ABORT' '\nNO ANSWER\r'
        'ABORT' '\nNO CARRIER\r'
        'ABORT' '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
        'ABORT' '\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r'
        '' '\rAT'
        'TIMEOUT' '12'
        'SAY' 'Press CTRL-C to close the connection at any stage!'
        'SAY' '\ndefining PDP context...\n'
        'OK' 'ATH'
        'OK' 'ATE1'
        'OK' 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","cmnet"'
        'OK' 'ATD*99#'
        'TIMEOUT' '22'
        'SAY' '\nwaiting for connect...\n'
        'CONNECT' ''
        'SAY' '\nConnected.'
        'SAY' '\nIf the following ppp negotiations fail,\n'
        'SAY' 'try restarting the phone.\n'
)

–> Avoid closed source software whenever you can.