- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html">Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</a></div>
- <div class="date">15th April 2015</div>
- <div class="body"><p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
-computer system for schools I've involved in,
-<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
-being used in India. But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
-interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
-Agarwal.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
-historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
-My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
-installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
-fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
-few software start-ups as well.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
-years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
-anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
-educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
-nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
-it was known then. Since then I have started using the various
-education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
-software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
-figuratively). Even if I take the simplest software which is
-gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
-the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
-pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
-<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
-<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
-
-<p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
-as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
-possibility of a larger life span. Of course with both it's more a
-question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
-for the developer per-se.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
-think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
-help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
-
-<p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
-that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
-However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
-pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
-but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
-Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
-still) I have had for a long time :</p>
-
-<p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
-each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
-far would each travel and similar questions like these.
-
-<p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
-be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
-interactive manner. While sites such as the
-<a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
-Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
-inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done. I dunno
-if there is a free software which does something like this. The idea
-being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
-this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
-colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
-or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
-This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
-the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
-psychics and everything in-between.</p>
-
-<p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
-one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
-meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
-also be used.</p>
-
-<p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
-enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary. I don't think it
-should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
-sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
-from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
-the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
-the user's input.</p>
-
-<p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
-palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
-needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
-copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
-nature, history etc. and let it loose. This could turn to be really
-huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
-commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
-stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
-
-<p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
-both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
-lot. This is more so in educational software as these applications
-need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
-immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
-maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
-of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
-maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
-aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
-quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
-between kpat and Aiselriot. In desktops it's a tie between
-gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
-whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
-Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
-school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
-people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
-various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
-
-<p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
-passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
-then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
-well.</p>
-
-<p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
-instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
-there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
-Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
-
-<p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
-and upgrades. People have this myth that each update and upgrade
-means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
-innumerable times. That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
-like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
-it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
-changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
-the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
-releases.</p>
-
-<p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
-is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
-is aimed at.
-
-<p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
-around 2 years, and
-<a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
-some experience</a> there. Some of the things we learnt/discovered
-there was :</p>
-
-<ol>
-
- <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
- and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
- portion/syllabus given.</li>
-
- <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
- is in the syllabus.</li>
-
- <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
- times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
- you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
- say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
- as recognizable as say a
- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
- Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
- possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
- which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
- parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
- something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
-
-</ol>
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Discharge_rate_estimate_in_new_battery_statistics_collector_for_Debian.html">Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian</a></div>
+ <div class="date">23rd May 2016</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>Yesterday I updated the
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats
+package in Debian</a> with a few patches sent to me by skilled and
+enterprising users. There were some nice user and visible changes.
+First of all, both desktop menu entries now work. A design flaw in
+one of the script made the history graph fail to show up (its PNG was
+dumped in ~/.xsession-errors) if no controlling TTY was available.
+The script worked when called from the command line, but not when
+called from the desktop menu. I changed this to look for a DISPLAY
+variable or a TTY before deciding where to draw the graph, and now the
+graph window pop up as expected.</p>
+
+<p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
+graphs (the one showing the last few hours). New is also the user of
+colours showing charging in blue and discharge in red. The percentages
+of this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
+capacity.</p>
+
+<p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
+
+<p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
+statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to
+visualise how the battery life time get shorter over time. The red
+line in this graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
+
+<p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
+
+<p>In this graph you can see that I only charge the battery to 80
+percent of last full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is
+shrinking. :(</p>
+
+<p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle
+more hardware models. On some hardware, Linux power supply
+information is stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the
+collector previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/. Now
+both are checked to figure if there is power connected to the
+machine.</p>
+
+<p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
+check out the
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
+in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
+Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from <a
+href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
+Patches are very welcome.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
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