Most of the day was totally absorbed, and the evening rather wasted. I was up so late last night, that I slept late this morning, but still had time to do some reading before it was time to leave; ma’s followup with the doctor was today.

So, much like November 2nd, I ended up sitting around the community medical centre, in the next county lol. This time howeber, I was smart enoguh to bring along my laptop. Unlike last time, it was only about a two hour affair, so there was ~40min of charge left by the time we left. After booting the computer, I chose to enable powerd in the hopes of prolonging the laptops battery life. While I’ve tried powerd over the years, most times I’ve had to give it up, either due to to high a level of performance loss or stability issues with my laptops ACPI.

One great perk of my great wealth of experience with computers, other then when I actually need a graphical program, I can function quite adeptly in text mode. Running the computer booted into text mode, rather then a fancy X11 desktop with transparency  and stuff, puts much less strain on the hardware. X pulls plenty of processor power, and should we say a windowing system requires quite a bit more use of the graphics card then drawing an 80×24 vtty !!!

Stability was good, and my CPU spent most of it’s time running just below 1Ghz, or approximately half of full speed. Repsonsiveness is much better under the newer hiadaptive power mode, then the regular adaptive mode, which takes care of my only other beef. According to FreeBSDs dmesg, I have a CPU: Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3300+ (1994.21-MHz 686-class CPU) which according the dev.cpu.0.freq_levels sysctl, is able to scale itself as low as ~99Mhz, or roughly the clock rate of a sexy Pentium from the time of Jurassic Park :-P.

In text mode, I spent my time with a screen session open: one window for testing software, one with vim for editing software, one for the language tools,, and another window for looking up documentation as needed. During the wait, I was able to get four git commits fired away on the Encapsulated Installer (EPI) project. My parters approved the use of Git for our implementations SCMS/VCS needs, much to my joy :-).

Currently I’m focused on a topic branch that seeks to develop “Extras” for epi-unpack and epi-verify, that can have wider usage throughout the toolset, not to mention make EPI management easier to script for system administrators and developers.

The ideals of maing the EPI system powerful, flexible, and easy, are very much at the heart of it’s design: and I have taken the influence of UNIX to heart in my development habbits.