Read Etexts problems with speech-dispatcher resolved -- mostly

[John Gilmore]

> > As noted here before, using a multi-threaded activity interferes with power
> > management.  Read Etexts will have functioning power management if
> > speech-dispatcher is not installed, but will not if it is installed, even if
> > you never use the Speech feature.
> 
> I did explore a few solutions to the problem and make the speechd API use
> gobjects to make the communication with the speech server asynchronous. I
> believe a certain bugfix in python 2.6 will resolve the problems we are
> facing, 

The bug has been fixed!  There's no need to avoid multi-tasking Python
programs any more.  It's fixed in python-2.6, PyGOboject 2.14.1, and
PyGTK 2.12.1.  See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4680#comment:12

The 8.2.0 release candidates in Joyride already include those releases
of PyGObject and PyGTK, and uses python-2.5 with the bug fix
back-ported from python-2.6.

It's trivial to tell whether your Python activity has this polling
problem that burns up power: just run it, and from another terminal,
find its process number(s) and run "strace -p NNNN" on them.  If the
activity is sitting there doing nothing, but the strace chatters on
with system call after system call, you have a polling bug.

	John