On my laptop (Pentium M, 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM) it takes exactly 68 seconds
from the time I press Enter in the GDM login screen, until the GNOME desktop
is completely loaded (the last applets appear and the disk activity stops).
This is GNOME 2.16.1 from Ubuntu Edgy.
This is after a fresh reboot (so, nothing in disk cache, except for
what Ubuntu's readahead loads). The startup process is not interfering (I
waited until the disk activity stopped before I logged in).
What does GNOME load? A large wallpaper (2304x1280 -- I use dual-head),
xcompmgr, Tomboy, Network Manager applet, a bunch of GNOME applets on three
panels (netspeed, gweather, battery, sound volume, two clocks, window
switcher, workspace switcher, two window lists, two system managers, CPU
frequency, trashcan, 7 launchers). And the usual GNOME processes (nautilus,
gnome-settings-daemon, etc.).
Still, 68 seconds is too much. I ought to figure out how to hook bootchart
to this thing and start filing bugs.
My gift to everyone: customizable key controls in PySpaceWar.
Our server's gift to us:
From: mdadm monitoring
To: root@...
Subject: Fail event on /dev/md2:...
Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2006 03:27:30 +0000 (GMT)
This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm
running on ...
A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md2.
Faithfully yours, etc.
Nice timing.
A coworker made me a USB
power injector for my Nokia 770 (I'm useless with a soldering iron).
Here it is in all its glory, next to the tiny USB keyboard I plan to use it
with:
Five days later I discover that it doesn't work any more. Actually, it
works, but the battery is dead. I left the battery connected to the voltage
regulator, and that was enough to drain it.
Wikipedia says that carbon-zinc 9V batteries have a
typical capacity of 400 mAh. ThoughtFix measured
the circuit power readings at 4.62 mA with both USB ports disconnected.
That's enough to drain a 400 mAh battery in 86 hours or 3.6 days. And here
I thought it would last for months...
Time to buy a new battery. And this time I'll keep it disconnected when I'm
not using it.
Ed Leafe asked me to change the licence of
profilehooks.py (see this post
for an introduction), so that he could include it with MIT-licenced Dabo. This was a perfect opportunity to release
profilehooks.py version 1.0.
News: a @timecall decorator, an option to print results immediately, and the licencing
change (GPL ➝ MIT).
