Major power concern

[John Gilmore]

> I've just noticed that release candidate 765 when fully charged tells me I
> have 2 1/2 hours of usage. This is a major concern, and something we really

What exactly is your concern?

  *  That the power display includes a time remaining?
  *  That the time remaining is wrong?
  *  That the time remaining is right, but should be longer?
  *  That an earlier software release lasted longer on battery?
  *  or some combination of the above?

I'm poking around to figure out where Sugar gets that number for the
time remaining.  Aha, it's in this code:

  /usr/share/sugar/shell/view/devices/battery.py

                #TODO: make this less of an wild/educated guess
                minutes_remaining = int(current_level / 0.59)
                remaining_hourpart = minutes_remaining / 60
                remaining_minpart = minutes_remaining % 60
                secondary_text = _('%(hour)d:%(min).2d remaining'
                                   % { 'hour': remaining_hourpart,
                                       'min': remaining_minpart})

How, uh, unusual to slip this into a release at the last minute!

The battery code has moved all around in the last two weeks (I think
it's been in three different places in the Sugar tree), so I found
it too hard to track who put this change in, and why.

I recall some free code that tracks battery performance over time, and
produces increasingly accurate predictions of when your battery will
run out, after watching your particular battery and your particular
system for a few full power cycles.  But a bit of searching didn't
turn it up for me today.

	John