Notes

I bought a new batery for my laptop in October 2008. A couple of days ago, I started getting abrupt shutdowns, even before the low-battery warning pops up.

And it doesn't enter sleep mode. It just goes puf, and powers off.

Searching around for similar reports, it seems that my battery is kaput. Either a cell is damaged, or the battery is starting to swell. I'm guessing its the first one, since I don't notice any swelling.

This is the third battery I've burned through with this laptop. The first one lasted from May 2006 up-to sometime early 2008. The second one lasted a couple of months, then started to swell. And now this one, since Mon Oct 27 23:20:47 2008 until today.

Now you might wonder how can I know the exact date and time that I got the new battery. The answer is simple. Before I switched to the new battery, I wrote this script, x-apple-log-battery-status, a quick and very dirty way of keeping track of all the stats about my battery.

I run it every 300 seconds. Given that the script logs the data to disk, it has to spin-up the disk and therefore influence the data collected, but I use my laptop intensely anyway. It rarely sleeps.

So I've recorded 53605 samples of my battery life. The first record is this:

t:1225149647 # Mon Oct 27 23:20:47 2008
fully_charged: No
is_charging: Yes
external_connected: Yes
cycle_count: 1
time_remaining: 38
max_capacity: 6869
voltage: 12485
current_capacity: 6516
design_capacity: 6300
temperature: 3082

The last one so far:

t:1266581334 # Fri Feb 19 12:08:54 2010
fully_charged: Yes
is_charging: No
external_connected: Yes
cycle_count: 561
time_remaining: 25013
max_capacity: 3367
voltage: 12459
current_capacity: 3335
design_capacity: 6300
temperature: 2944

As you can see, I've still have about 50% of the original capacity, but with 561 cycles.

The entire file is here: battery_log.txt.gz, 736Kb of gzipped data. You can do whatever you want with it, I only ask that if you do something interesting, send me a link.

Someday I'll dump this into a spreadsheet and do some pretty graphics.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The lack of trust that Google as gained in the last year is impressive.

Gone are the days that you could actually believe the "Don't be evil" corporate motto. The reality came crushing down, and Buzz is only one of the last proofs that "Don't be evil" is much different proposition than "Do good".

I'm fortunate enough not to use a lot of Google services, but still the amount of information they have on me is scary. I knew some of it, and I was aware of the social graph efforts going on inside Google, in particular Brad Fitzpatrick work when he first joined The New Borg.

But the path they choose with Buzz, assuming that my address book or even my chat roster, has anything to do with my social network, is wrong on so many levels.

For the geeks at Google, it appears that one step in their quest to harness all of the human knowledge is to treat humans as a flat concept, without any levels in their social relations. I no longer have best friends, whom I trust almost everything about me but that rarely exchange electronic messages, but I keep in my address book, with some guy that asked me a couple of questions some months ago. All of them get put in the same basket. So the same level of trust and sharing privileges is attached to all of them by default.

What bothers me the most is that now, until I can find replacements for the services that I find useful at Google (address book and mail), I will have to create new empty random Google account, and use each one for parts of the data I have in there.

The Future

During my college days, I was specially interested on distributed systems. I intuitively believed that they were the only solution for resilient scalable network-oriented services. What I couldn't imagine was that just how much important they are for the little level of privacy that I expect from online services.

So one of my goals for 2010 is to split my online information across several online services. Also, study options to move them back to my control.

As for Google, I guess it is time to start working on active Google blocking tools. There is definitively a war coming.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

... go marching in.

Congrats to all the Saints fans, excellent second half, with a awesome starting play.

Drew Brees MVP. Pity about not breaking the pass record. Tied with Brady at 32.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)