Category: General

Random Pidgin (on Windows) crashes finally resolved

A couple of months ago we deployed Pidgin on all workstations for our internal Instant Messaging needs. All seemed well until on a few workstations random crashes occurred (multiple times per day!). There was no recognisable pattern for the crashes, and, as you can imagine, big frustrations amongst those who were affected.

A while ago I stumbled on Pidgin bug report 5662 and thought that might be the bug we were encountering – but there were no efforts going on to fix the issue. It turned out to actually be GTK-on-Windows’ fault (thanks to David Grohmann for the analysis and bringing it to the attention of the GTK developers).

Now, “only” eight months after the bug had been reported, the issue has been fixed in GTK. The crashes on those workstations disappeared after bringing the new Pango libraries into place.

The Closest Book Meme

I was just reading some posts on planet.gentoo.org and thought I’d take part in The Closest Book Meme. So as a reply to Christian, this is mine:

Since I don’t have any real books (paper is deprecated), I opened the first ebook I found when browsing through the files stored on my mobile (lying directly in front of me, thus technically being the nearest book) 😉

It’s The Short-Timers: The Spirit of the Bayonet by Gustav Hasford. After pressing page down for 55 times in fullscreen mode on my Nokia 9300i, I found the fifth sentence to be:

Civilians and members of the lesser services bleed all over the place like bed wetters.

—————————–

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open it to page 56.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
  5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 battery consumption test

Last night I ran a quick test on how long my new Dell Inspiron Mini 9‘s battery would last under “normal netbook workload”.

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))