Model Reality

Annoyed that Fedora 7 doesn’t have the same CLI tools to get battery status, I coded up a little python script last night to do just that. It was a pretty straight-forward project that took me about an hour, but I was pretty happy with the end result. It reads the proper files out of the /proc/acpi/battery hierarchy, does some calculations on that data and the gives you what you really want.

You start with this:

thesis|18:46|~% cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
present:                 yes
design capacity:         65520 mWh
last full capacity:      69150 mWh
battery technology:      rechargeable
design voltage:          14400 mV
design capacity warning: 3457 mWh
design capacity low:     200 mWh
capacity granularity 1:  1 mWh
capacity granularity 2:  1 mWh
model number:            42T5229
serial number:           35751
battery type:            LION
OEM info:                SANYO
thesis|18:46|~% cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state
present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          charging
present rate:            8595 mW
remaining capacity:      66620 mWh
present voltage:         16690 mV

And you get this:

Battery 0: 96.46% (0:17 until charged)

In the spirit of sharing and trying new things, I thought I would register it as Google Code project and give it away under a BSD License. It was about a ten minutes process, start to finish and now the world can have it:

http://code.google.com/p/batterystatus/

Hurray for non-scarce economics!

Dinner with Todd (a former coworker) in downtown PA. This followed my
first visit to the dev floor at Facebook.

I visited Westgate doe the first time today. It was surprisingly great
for a mall. I met an Israeli girl hawking Dead Sea skin care products
and had Bear Papa creampuffs.

A little found irony to brighten up your day.

Don basking in the glow of Mission St. neon.

… A self-portrait.