I’ve just charged my notebook’s battery fully, then allowed it to discharge while the machine was idle. First of all, I nobbled the power management settings in Fedora 11 to make sure that the screen stayed bright throughout, and it didn’t perform a neat shutdown when it guessed the battery was close to death.
I have the four cell Li-Ion battery, product ID AA-PB0TC4L, which Samsung claims will last four hours, based on BatteryMark tests.
It took 1 hour 53 minutes to discharge.
I present this figure without further comment because I don’t know whether this type of battery takes a few charge/discharge cycles to gain a longer life, or any other possible explanations.
A raw MySQL dump of Manx is now online: vt100.net/manx/dump. I think there was an XML dump at some point, which linked publications and copies, but I don’t know how that was generated at the moment.
I’ve scribbled two pages of notes about Manx’s schema and philosophy which need typing up at some point. Well, “philosophy” is a grand word for it, but I mean some notes which explain why the database is organised a certain way, and how it is more than a list of documents. Manx is very much geared to cataloguing technical documentation, and a proper discussion of the features may help future maintainers.
The code that powers Manx needs some organisation and separating from the back-end scripts, many of which are obsolete and would only serve to obscure your understanding of the application. I’ll get round to that (hopefully) shortly.
The database is free for you to use in any way you see fit.
I’ve been working on a project to fake some network protocols to test one of our systems at work. One of them is Network Time Protocol. I daren’t just set my PC to random years and then serve this time to the target system, so I wrote a little NTP server in Perl, which allows me to lie about time to other people. I just set time back to Friday 12 September 1941, switched to my news reader, and the first item from BBC news was an alert from the War Department that there’s a fresh wave of V1s coming over the Kent coast.
Tomorrow, I’m going to set time forward by a decade, to see if I’ve got a better job yet.
