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I’m going out on a limb. I think Optus is going to be giving more than just iPhone users unmetered access to Apple’s Internet properties.

Yesterday I downloaded Season 2 of the best TV ever.

Thankfully HBO have been gradually adding seasons of The Wire to the US iTunes Music Store, and I’ve been buying them and making my way through them.

I was a bit concerned with how big a season is. 7.5GB is a good chunk of my 30GB quota. Not too big a deal but last month iTMS Daily Shows & Colbert Reports, work VPN and random tinkering put me over the 20GB mark.

I checked the Optus web-based usage meter how much of my quota I had used in the first 5 days of July: About 2.5GB.

I set off and downloaded four episodes. About 2.5GB of files. When they had finished downloading I waited a couple of hours and went back to check the Optus usage meter. It had registered 259MB of activity. Maybe it was being particularly slow to update. Anyway, I downloaded the remaining 5GB, watched two episodes and went back to check my usage: 3.8GB.

Curious.

Because I needed to put one of my Office 2007 Home licenses on the kids’ PC, I downloaded it (298MB) and checked usage again: 4.1GB and holding steady.

7.5GB of “The Wire” from iTunes cost me about 1.3GB in usage quota. 298MB of installer from Microsoft (via Digital River) cost me about 298MB of quota.

Cue Twilight Zone theme.

I’ve hunted through my contract and I can’t see anywhere where it says Apple is some Internet usage metering haven. My only explanation is that Optus can’t, or won’t, just give iPhone users free access to Apple Internet resources and they’re engineering their network to treat everyone like an iPhone user.

I can’t think of any explanation for why Optus is charging me somewhere between full rate and zero in quota. Is there something I’m missing? Secret Optus brownie points for not using BitTorrent? Most people who complain about the Optus usage meter say it over-counts their traffic.

After reading about and enjoying the Firefox 3.0 about:robots “feature,” Mr 5’s $8 plastic gift for accompanying me to the markets today might have been a subliminally-suggested choice. We acquired a fashivhably coloured, double-luffing, go-ahead homage to a silly software release mascot.

For fans of robots, this model screams “Fire. Fire. Get down!” deafeningly and something else we can’t make out. Non! Stop! All the while swivelling its randomly illuminated plastic torso and waggling its arms up and down. He falls over due to being newly hatched from a Styrofoam incubator — and he’s obviously not yet accustomed to his roller skates.

“Could sound a beautiful music” (which we assume is a rough translation for “emits loud screaming and gunfire”) led to Dobo Arigato Mr Beat Magnum having a nasty run-in with J.

Mr 5 couldn’t hear his mother screaming at him to make the bad robot stop. He’s is missing an arm now (Mr Beat Magnum, not Mr 5), complete with dangling wires. This makes him look much cooler and we have a war story about the time he sacrificed an arm to save Mr 5 from harm.

Worth reading just for the introduction.

From the outset, they adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy, gaining notoriety for various anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of prominent cryptic advertisements in NME magazine and the mainstream press, and highly distinctive and unusual performances on Top of the Pops. Their most notorious performance was at the February 1992 BRIT Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This performance announced The KLF’s departure from the music business, and in May 1992 the duo deleted their entire back catalogue.

Esoteric novels? They were the finest of their indescribable genre.

I blame sleep-deprivation for a lack of even sporadic blogging.

Rather than kick off a del.icio.us linkspam bot, I’ll just refer you over to the rightleft. My Google Reader shared items change far more frequently than this blog.

That widget is powered by the wake of my leveraged synergy drive.

This week I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on my Vista desktop using Wubi. Wubi lets you install Ubuntu as a dual-boot option that can be uninstalled from Vista’s add/remove programs control panel widget (but why would you?).

Short review: Wubi Rocks.

For a long time I thought that if I were better able to quickly construct illuminating diagrams to make a point or communicate a concept then I’d be a much more effective communicator. Effective communication is a boon to software development, so improving my ability to rapidly pump out neat diagrams was a noble goal worthy of investment.

I thought that if I had a tablet I’d be able to pick up any drawing package and quickly render those few boxes, circles, arrows, classes, use-cases and swimlanes with a pen in double-quick time. Surely a pen is the natural way to draw, and therefore faster and easier.

I had my eye on a Wacom tablet for a while. I had used a few casually and found them awkward. Designer friends told me that it takes some getting used to and a rigour about the way you set up and use applications. I had also worked with a UK-based engineer who used one for illustrating and annotating shared applications, presentations and documents during design collaboration conference calls. I was convinced my first impressions were wrong.

“Cool” I thought. “Let the tablet-led communication-effectiveness and R&D begin!”

After I saw that Julian had a tablet, I abandoned rational thought and cool-headed evaluation while toy envy took over. I dropped about AU$100 on a cheap Wacom-like tablet to figure out if it was a worthwhile addition to my professional and home-tinkering life.

After getting used to looking at the screen and not the tablet, and making the mental switch from mouse-relative pointing to tablet-absolute positioning seem relatively natural I worked on using a few applications.

In a week or so of trial use I came to the following conclusions:

• EverNote is way cool for doing shape-drawing, but I was still about half as fast at constructing diagrams with the tablet as using a mouse and keyboard. I also made lots of mistakes with the tablet that were kind of painful to correct. I wish more applications had EverNote’s (and the Apple Newton’s) shape recognition/fixup mode.
• Visio is kind of awkward with a mouse, and even more awkward with a pen.
• Few applications have big enough icons that can also be positioned conveniently enough for tablet use.
• Unsurprisingly, the best applications are painting programs like Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Primarily it’s because with a tablet the curve you render on the tablet is the curve you see on the screen. With a mouse, you have to convince your body to implement a kind of feedback and control system to modify your physical action to produce the curve you want to render.
• Tablets are cruel and frustrating.

I gave up on the Wacom-style tablet, though I’m not sure that I gave it a fighting chance. I got to a point where my frustration was greater than the residual value of my AU$100 investment and abandoned it.

Time passed… and the opportunity to get a tablet PC at less than extortionate prices presented itself. Quite apart from the X61 being a tablet PC, it’s far more portable and usable than any laptop I’ve owned since my Mac PowerBook 170.

In summary, in the contest between tablets and tablet PCs, tablet PCs win.

Direct manipulation of screen pixels is much more approachable than separate tablet hardware. They’re more portable, convenient for more applications and they don’t get your colleagues confused about whether you’re a graphic designer or a developer.

That’s not to say tablet PCs are the perfect tool for diagramming.

Bear with me while I offer some completely un-benchmarked productivity estimates.

When it comes to drawing diagrams with perfect boxes and lines in an application like Illustrator or Visio, I’m about 20% faster with a mouse. If the requirement is for nicely typed text, then the mouse and keyboard wins by about 50% over the tablet PC.

But there’s a diagramming mode where the tablet PC shines: freehand diagrams.

If the boxes, lines and arrows don’t need to be perfect, and if the text is handwritten, and if the diagram won’t need to be maintained, then drawing freehand using OneNote or EverNote on the tablet PC is probably 50% faster than using a keyboard and mouse.

After recognising this my primary use of the pen mode on my X61 Tablet has settled into these tasks:

• Quick and dirty diagrams to capture notes or communicate information, often projected on a meeting room display or web conference, and sometimes to be later transcribed into a “proper” UML tool or Visio.
• Annotation of documents, spreadsheets and presentations with Office 2007’s pen reviews.
• Note-taking & annotation of typed notes.
• Painting.

For me personally, the dream of being able to use any illustration package more effectively with some kind of tablet is gone, yet note-taking with freehand illustrations is something I now find indispensable.

Fafblog is stirring.

If I go back to using Bloglines from Reader and pretend Billmon is still around I’ll be blog-partying on teh Internets like it’s 2004.

Every patch on my X61 tablet seems to bring Vista closer to the nimble responsive OS I’d like on my quasi-mobile PC that isn’t a Mac.  Today I noted on (Ars Technica) that Vista patch nirvana had arrived: SP1.

It’s not kidding either.  It was 1 hour and 20 minutes later that it declared Windows Vista SP1 installed on my tablet.  Thankfully no intervention is required during that time.

Now fingers crossed that not waiting for the Windows Update push in mid-April will spare me an NT 4.0 service-pack-like experience. 

So far I can report an overwhelming sense of sameness.  It’s quiet.  Too quiet.

Update:…and it boots and comes out of sleep faster.

…but almost that boring.

I Am A: True Neutral Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-12
Dexterity-15
Constitution-12
Intelligence-14
Wisdom-14
Charisma-15

Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he’s not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

I wonder what D&D life would be like if I had agreed to assassinate the president in the survey? Oh wait. The back button is my friend.

Obviously I would be among the most odious of chaotic, sonofabitches…

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Lee-Harvey Oswald was true neutral before he shot JFK and neutral good after? Tell that to Jack Ruby.

I guess the survey is aware of who’s currently President of the US. Maybe it’s geo-located me and knows that my country doesn’t have a president. If I would assassinate some dictator who masquerades as president in Australia’s freedom-tolerating system of constitutional monarchy, then there is good in me!

Via Jeff Freeman

What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?

I know I’m not much of a marketing person. A marketing person recently told me that if developers were in charge of marketing, sashimi would be marketed as cold dead fish. I said developers were not that naive. We would actually market it as delicious cold dead fish.

But, you know, there must be a point where even marketing people run out of ideas with a product.

What more is left to do with, or say about, toilet rolls?

You can put puppies and ducklings in your advertising and talk about how soft it is. You can give it a name and a motto that speaks to how tough and unyielding it is like “Green bamboo Toilet paper: Very Tenacious!”[1] You can scent its “core” to make it remind you less of what you do with it. You can print your enemy’s image or poetry on it. You can cover it with pictures of shells and fish to remind you where it ends up. You can cover it in brown paper with happy flowers on it to distract consumers from the feeling of environmental purgatory that using it is going to give you.

You can also decide to make a roll of toilet paper longer and make something out of that.

This is what’s written on the outside of a packet of Kleenex Cottonelle toilet tissue.

“Change the roll less often. Double length. It’s twice as long. 1 double length roll = 2 regular Kleenex brand rolls.”

Finding that much to say about 1x = 2y is worthy of whatever the toilet tissue industry equivalent of an Oscar is.

[1] J & I were given this brand of toilet paper in Hong Kong before a month-long trek through China. It lived up to its motto.

Once upon a time in 2002 or 2003, Mr Ed asked me if I had any interest in writing an essay for a new web site he was thinking of setting up called HackNot!  I had a bunch of mostly sardonic and simple thoughts in a file somewhere and I sent it off to him asking if this was the kind of thing he was after.  He relied yes, and I duly got busy with something else and evaded towards completing it. 

I think Ed grew tired of waiting for me and edited my incoherent rambling into an ordered list and plugged it up into public view. 

I thought that now, nearly 5 years later, would be a good time to re-examine some of those thoughts.  I’m way kindler, way gentler, and way more verbose now.  The process of looking at what I thought 5 years ago is bound to ignite a flame war with myself.

I’ve taken a copy of the HackNot! article and added notes along the way.

In 1995 the Unabomber’s manifesto was published in The New York Times. In 2001 the Agile Alliance published their Agile Manifesto. Now our own Tedious Soporific gets in on the act. His personal manifesto leaves no area of software development untouched - from the hazards of frameworks to the role of “doof doof” music in requirements elicitation, it’s all here. Truly a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Heartbreaking and staggering but not genius.

Requirements

• Humans read requirements.
• Humans lose interest if they can’t understand the requirement, or why it’s there.
• Requirements numbers should never contain the section number of the document they are in.
• A requirement only needs to require an implementation in rare circumstances when you need to require a point of concrete integration(shall run inside IE 4.0 and up etc.)
• Requirements should be able to be tested. If you write a requirement that may be hard to test, write supporting notes about how you would envisage the requirement will be tested.

This is a bit of a crude list of things that have irked me about requirements in the past.  I would say, without fail, that poorly written, or conceived, requirements cause me the most pain in my work.  Both reading other peoples’ and re-reading my own hastily-prepared requirements can be a trial.  These days I think I would just point to Carl Weigers’ two excellent texts and leave it at that.

According to Capers-Jones, best practice is to spend 10% of a “systems” software development project’s effort on systems engineering.

• User interfaces are design, not requirements.
• Track requirements met during development by mapping requirement coverage to test results.

I stand by my statement, but the reason it’s a manifesto entry is that UI design is not a requirements generation activity.  It’s a design activity, and a vitally important one.

One of the most interesting diagrams about the importance of user interface design and its relationship to estimation I’ve seen is on page 39 of Steve McConnell’s “Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art” (see a spreadsheet I prepared earlier here) where he discusses the cone of uncertainty.  This diagram is about the variability in estimates done as a project progresses. 

Before “product definition” a project may take from one quarter to four times the time estimated at this point.  Estimations done at the time detailed requirements are available take the likely variability ranges from two thirds to one and a half times estimates done at this time.  The next step is user interface design.  When the UI is designed, the likely variation from estimates done at this time are from 0.8x the estimate to 1.25x.  If you’re not doing a UI design and re-estimating at each milestone of project definition, you’re not interested in estimates.

I’d go further than tracking requirements to tests and say that requirements should be mapped to architecture and design so the relationship between design decisions and requirements is obvious to developers and archaeologists who look upon your project in later years. 

• Because a customer asks for a feature to be implemented, that alone doesn’t make it a good feature.
• Moral time: A man walks into a hospital having already diagnosed himself with prostate cancer. He demands that a surgeon operate immediately to remove the cancer. The surgeon operates. The man is caused inconvenience, discomfort and pain for the rest of his life from side-effects of the operation. The surgeon could have refused to operate, citing that 80% of men die with, and not because of, prostate cancer. The surgeon gave the man what he asked for and not what he needed.

What a smarmy bastard I was.

A simpler way of putting this is that the job of a software professional is to tell your customer when they’re asking you to do something they shouldn’t do.  Sure, they can go ahead and do whatever the silly thing is anyway, but you shouldn’t really let someone demand that your team build a content management system when there are free and commercial versions out there that may meet your customers’ needs.  Customers tend to talk about how the system should look, so it’s easy to fall down a rabbit-hole of having the customer design everything for you.  If you are mindlessly implementing everything your customer tells you to, you’re somewhere in the spectrum of working with a very capable customer to not behaving as a professional software developer.

• Q: What can you brush your teeth with, sit on, and telephone people with?
  A: A toothbrush, a chair and a telephone.

This is a bit too subtle and clever, which contradicts something else in the manifesto (see below).  I advocate looking at the problem to see if you’re solving one problem or several.  Consider if it’s really appropriate to solve two or three distinct problems with one development or a monolithic product.  Any way a project can be made smaller, or divided up into several projects is advantageous.  In software we have know from Barry Boehm’s work that there is a diseconomy of scale of software development, so three small projects have a much greater chance of succeeding and coming in near to time than one big project does.

Performance

• Specify performance early.
• Optimise late.

Specify performance requirements as early as you can and realistically.  If you find your customer pulling very ambitious figures out of thin air, mark the performance requirement for later.  If you find there is hard and believable data behind the performance requirement, then you should note the source and breathe easy that the performance requirement is believable.

Optimising late is a reaction to developers who get carried away making code perfect up front.  If you have a believable performance requirement that is unprecedented then you should see this as a project risk and consider prototyping, benchmarking and discovering early if your project needs to be sent to an early grave for being infeasible before you spend a lot of money and reputation on something impossible.  Pay attention to performance and don’t optimize things that aren’t a bottleneck or won’t help you meet your project goals. 

Documentation

• Styles in Microsoft Word are your friend. If you want a Word processor, use Word. If you want a typewriter, use Notepad.

There are many things that may be reused in software development.  Documents are one of the most commonly reused development artifacts.  If you use Word to do your documentation, learn about styles, automation, cross-references, footnotes, and keep your source material close to the document and in source control.  Don’t be too proud to go on a Word course - if you’re tabbing, or double-entering to get paragraph markers please go on a course. 

Design

• Beware the “framework.”

Perhaps this should read “Beware the project with no end and no clear customer” as this entry was about projects that allow themselves the luxury to think that everyone wants what they’re producing they just don’t know it yet.  I’m sure many successful frameworks came from over-resourced projects with an ambition to meet requirements they just invented for customers that “don’t even exist yet” but I’m also sure there’s a 20:1 ratio of failures to modestly successful frameworks born from over-generous budget allocation.

• Spurn the “reusable component.”

Reuse was big at the end of the 90’s, resurfaced as Product Line Engineering in the early 00’s and seems to have died down prior to resurfacing as SOA around about now.  I’ve written before about how I think that design, experience and plain-old code-stealing are some of the most effective forms of reuse.  Backed by tools that support findability and developer communication, code reuse will blossom in an organization.  Building a repository of carefully curated reusable components and controlling their use and limiting their mutations is intended to reduce testing requirements and defect propagation, but it also stifles innovation and discourages reuse.

• It’s hard to specify a framework because what users might require rarely becomes what they’ll need for sure: “You ain’t gonna need it.” Your customer wants to pay for a solution for their problem, not everyone else’s.

Would you like to be a customer who wanted to pay for an SQL query and got an ORM framework for only twice the price?

Technologies

• XML: it’s just a verbose way of representing structured data.
• SIP: it’s just a signalling protocol.

The road to hell is paved with overreaching hyperbole about the potential of new technologies.  Both XML and SIP are useful technologies; both brilliant and compromised.  Before them was WAP, Token-Ring, OpenDoc and a lot of other promising technology that was way over-hyped. 

Projects

• Top Ten Lessons from the Dot Com Meltdown
• Try not to build R2 before R1 has any customers.

Most projects have version two of a product loaded up with features a long time before version 1.0 has been seen by customers.  The absolute best resource for requirements is customers, and their best ideas don’t come in focus groups or interviews about the problems they have.  Customers’ best ideas come when they’ve seen version 1.0 and hate it enough to tell you what they’d really like.  If the next release is already full of requirements that are sourced from marketing or product management, customers will be upset with 2.0 as well.  If you can’t make them happy with release 1.0, make them happy the second time they see a release.  Customers you listen to become your ally and make marketing a whole lot easier.

• When someone says “I know this is a death march, but you will be rewarded well if you succeed or fail,” run (away) like the wind.

This was a lie told to me once.  Use the experience to remain as professional as you can, or run.

Peopleware

• Habitable development environments.

This was a placeholder for something I read once and could never find again.  The idea is that, like share accommodation, teams need to find their level of process and code hygiene.  Some brilliant developers work with little infrastructure and formality and others work best with lots of structure.  When building a team consider what each developer finds habitable and make sure you get a team that can accept the coding standards, process rigour and meeting load that you intend to inflict on them.  In a share house, some people like to leave the dishes until there’s a good pile, others like to wash everything on a regular basis.  If you have lived with people at either end of the cleanliness and habitability spectrum, you know how important this can be.

• Give directives in positive terms.
• Avoid saying what shouldn’t be done.
• Toddlers and software engineers want to please you, and do the right thing.
• Toddlers and software engineers hear “Don’t do X” and become paralysed with uncertainty because they now know for sure what they shouldn’t do,but can’t figure out what you do want them to do.

How patronising!  It’s a subtle message. 

If you want people to change, tell them what the outcome should look like in terms they understand.  If an executive stands up and says “don’t be evil,” your expectation is that you can go right up to the line, lean over and smell the sulphur, and still be in the clear.  If your executive says “from now on we’re not a services company” middle management might set about firing your services staff with no vision for what you really want to be. 

User Interfaces

• Usable interfaces should not be innovative. If it’s clever or tricky,then it’s probably confusing.
• Users don’t use the right mouse button.

Let’s back off to saying that you can’t expect users to rely on the right mouse button.  Watch some regular users use applications sometime. 

• It’s hard to know when to double-click unless someone shows you.

Watch some users sometime.  A lot of older users double-click hyperlinks because someone once showed them that the way you get a computer to respond to you was to double-click.

• Users don’t use tree views. Users don’t get trees.
• Users only (very) rarely see trees on computers.
• Developers love tree-views.
• DevStudio [and Eclipse have] trees.
• Windows file explorer shows a tree.
• Most users never see or use tree-views when they’re using Windows (or Macs) and don’t find them comfortable.
• Think about where the Windows explorer is located in the Start-> menu(it’s an “Accessory”) and where the “My Computer” icon is (on theDesktop) and what happens when you double-click it.
• You have to configure Outlook to show a tree view of your folders on the left.
• Standard Windows application file (save/open) dialog does not show a tree.
• A tree is not an easy metaphor. When was the last time you saw a real live tree of folders?

I guess I was tired of seeing lots of new applications that looked just like the IDEs used to build them.  The tree has thankfully been supplanted by the Google-like search & results list. 

Miscellaneous

• It’s hard to write requirements unless you’re ears are being pounded by”doof doof” music.

Actually “doof doof, chikka, doof doof” music is better, I’ve found.

• Unfinished Sympathy is the finest pop song ever written.

I have to revise this one day.  But the combination of serious-sounding nonsense lyrics, orchestral pomp and an addicting hook make it hard to beat.

• “Refactoring” is not synonymous with “fixing bugs”.

Like the XML and SIP thing, this was written at a time when the term was overused.  “I’m going to refactor that bug report” or “I’m going to refactor my performance problems” were not uncommon.

I’ll follow up later with “Epiphanies about software” posts, but I think I’m done with manifestos.

I’ve had my X61 tablet for about four months now, so it’s time to talk about wear and tear and how battery life looks in regular usage.

In general, it’s the least battered-looking of any laptop I’ve owned at 4 months.  The only externally visible signs that it’s not a brand new laptop are that the screen is usually covered with my grubby fingerprints, and the middle-bottom of the screen has pulled away every so slightly from the plastic cowling above the rotating hinge.  If you look carefully you can see the adhesive has pulled away from the two pieces of plastic. 

Another defect I’ve recently encountered is a broken button on the tablet pen.  At AU$60 replacement cost, I was expecting the tablet pen to be pretty solid.  In general it feels like it is. It feels great and it comes with extra nibs and a piece of circular scrap metal generously described as a nib-remover by the manual, which indicates which part the designers expect to wear out first.  The Achilles heel of the tablet pen is the button on the side which is used for the equivalent of a right mouse click.  The button has a hilariously flimsy plastic bracer to hold it into the pen body. This tiny, fragile, destined-to-fail, bracer, snapped on mine.  No more right-clicks and context menus for me in tablet mode.

I was about to cry into my coffee this morning when my two year old unhelpfully suggested sticky tape.  I was drawing breath to humour her with praise for suggesting her cure-all for anything broken (plates, cars, dead pets, flat batteries) when it occurred to me that it might actually work.  See the image attached for the resurrected pen.  It now feels more solid and clicks more positively than before it broke.

I’ll work on Lenovo to see if my warranty is worth pursuing later in the week.

Practical battery life

I’ve been on a course this week, so I’ve been able to check out a real-life battery longevity scenario. 

Usually I’m only away from power for two or three hours of meeting use, and that hasn’t really tested the battery life near its limits so that isn’t too interesting. 

This week I’ve been in a room from 9am to 4:30pm for two (and a half) days, and managed to get the X61 to last the whole time by plugging in for 45 and 50 minutes at lunch (12:10 to 1pm-ish).  On the course I was taking sporadic notes, and being distracted by one or two projects that were running hot though my instant messengers and email.  I had WPA-2 wireless G connectivity up 100% of the time and I was running Microsoft Outlook 2003, OneNote 2007, MS Office Communicator 2005, Google Talk Firefox  and Word 2007. I was using the tablet lightly enough to have brief IM conversations and answer emails, while still being attentive enough to engage with the instructor and not get thrown out (the course was 8 hours of information crammed into a 3 day course, so sue me for my lack of attention).  I run with about 4 bars of screen brightness, and use a slightly tweaked clone of the power-source-optimised power profile.

On day 1 ended at 4:30 with 37 minutes of battery left according to the battery meter, and on day 2 we ended closer to 4:10pm and I had 50 minutes of battery left according to the same source.

My X61’s battery is a 4.55 Amp Hour 8-cell Sanyo Lithium Ion (FRU 93P5032 in Lenovo parts speak).  Better longevity than I expected.