Beautiful chair and cot at NGV International, Melbourne

I argued the benefits of laziness at last week’s Victoria Mac User Group (iMUG) meeting and Garry was in the audience. We chatted afterwards and it seems the topic struck a cord.

Detail from Kim Hoa Tram's NGV International exhibit

Unicode support is important. Unicode support means that DssW licences can now include characters from any written language.

In the past we have had to issue licences with simplified, and in some cases mangled, name and organisation details. Limitations in our payment software meant we had to settle with a solution that worked well for the majority. Regretably, a few customers received licences where their details had to be simplfied.

Thankfully that is all in the past.

We felt it was essential for our resellers to be able to provide licences issued in their local written language. The software we built to power the DssW Authorised Reseller programme supports unicode from the ground up. Resellers can provide licences using any written language their customers need.

We use the same system as our resellers. Thus, like our resellers, DssW’s licences now support any written language.

Helen Bray's handmade Tiffany lamp

Easier because purchasing software from within an organisation can often be difficult and time consuming. Many organisations have strict purchasing protocols and procedures that need to be followed. Others have restricted suppliers and can only deal with specific resellers.

Those barriers have been reduced or removed entirely.

You can now ask your prefered software supplier to sign up as a DssW Authorised Reseller. For your supplier it is a clear pay-as-you-go deal with access to exclusive resale licences. For you for it means dealing with people you know and who know your organisation’s needs.

Through a DssW Authorised Reseller, you can purchase DssW solutions in your local currency and get great licence deals not available directly from us.

Exclusive reseller licence deals include fixed cost Power Manager packs for:

• 25, 50, and 75 Mac small-to-medium enterprise environments;
• Classroom and academic lab licences;
• School licences.

These packs offer great value and are designed to make purchasing for your organisation easy, affordable, and smart.

If you are thinking of deploying an energy saving solution within your organisation, you should be talking to your friendly technical contacts about DssW today.

Cardboard chair, NGV International

Macworld clearly gets what we are trying to do with Power Manager 3. They appreciate that it does not suit single users but instead is ideal for managed Mac environments, like schools and businesses.

I love the buying advice:

Power Manager 3 isn’t an essential purchase for home users, but for offices and other organisations managing lots of Macs, it might just help save the world. Macworld team

I will discuss how laziness has affected the design of Mac OS X, and how laziness influences the design decisions behind DssW Power Manager.

CSIRAC – Australia's First Computer, Melbourne Museum

It will be fun to brush up on my public speaking skills, share some stories of those who have shaped Mac OS X, and get the chance to meet you in person.

The meeting is free and open to the public.

Thanks to iMUG’s president, Les Posen, for the invitation to speak.

Christopher recommended Power Manager 3 to Brian Silverman as a more capable replacement to Mac OS X’s built-in Energy Saver scheduler.

Green leaves.

“Unlike with Energy Saver, Power Manager 3 allows you to create schedules for any day and time of the week. Additionally it can handle a variety of tasks including startup, wake, sleep, log out, log in, restart, and shut down. You can also create one-time events.”
Christopher Breen, Macworld

“Power Manager is easy to configure, intuitive and does everything you expect it to do, and very well I might say. The best thing about Power Manager is that you only have to configure it once and then you can forget about it.”
Gabriela Ghinita, Softpedia

“When it comes to things I didn’t like about Power Manager, I can’t find anything to say.”
Gabriela Ghinita, Softpedia

Softpedia Very Good Award for Power Manager

Sustainable Living Festival 2008, Federation Square, Melbourne

Power Manager 3.7.2 is free for existing users of Power Manager 3 and highly recommended.

Changes in Power Manager 3.7.2

• Improved Quick Status interface.
• Improved feedback field to allow multiple line comments.
• Improved status menu ‘nothing pending’ icon.
• Minor documentation improvements.
• Fixed potential crashing bug when rescheduling events.

With Power Manager installed, every user on your Mac has a pmassistant process running. To log out a specific user, send their pmassistant process a USR1 signal (SIGUSR1).

Applications > Utilities > Terminal

Listing pmassisants

To get a list of pmassisant processes running on your Mac, type the following into the Terminal:

ps auxc | grep pmassistant

The response will look something like the following:

mb         467   0.0  0.5   124968   5152   ??  S     1:08pm   0:00.28 pmassistant
gcm        164   0.0  0.4   246612   3992   ??  S     9:47am   0:00.29 pmassistant

Send a SIGUSR1 signal to the pmassistant process

To send a SIGUSR1 to a pmassistant, and thus log that user out, type the following into the Terminal:

sudo kill -USR1 467

The 467 must be replaced with the process id of the user’s pmassistant. Sending a SIGUSR1 to non-pmassistant processes will result in unpredictable behaviour.

After entering your password, to ensure only those with administrator rights can log out users, pmassistant will nicely log out the user.

Why is this an improvement?

Using pmassistant to log out a user is better than Mac OS X’s default behaviour when forcing fast switched users to log out.

Mac OS X and Darwin’s automatic shut down methods are brutal. They do not respect the Mac architecture. These methods come from a unix world and thus expect particularly resilient behaviour from running applications. Sadly this expectation does not bode well for many of today’s Mac applications.

Power Manager uses a friendly method of logging out users’ processes. It still ends with a guaranteed log out, but it gives running applications a chance to autosave changes and release resources or hardware appropriately.

Power Manager 3.7.1 provides an easy way for you get in touch and tell us what we could do to better.

Remove Power Manager comments screen

Power Manager’s new removal assistant includes a screen for sending us comments and suggestions. You can also request to be e-mailed when new versions of Power Manager are released — maybe the next version will entice you into joining us.

The removal assistant lets you send us the following:

• Your comments and suggestions;
• Name and e-mail address.

If you decide to get in touch, the following information is included with your feedback:

• Power Manager version i.e. 3.7.1;
• Identifier of the removal tool used i.e. uk.co.dssw.powermanager.remove.

You can choose not to send us any feedback by unchecking both the check boxes. Nothing will be sent and no contact will be made with DssW if both these boxes are unchecked.

Nothing is sent if both check boxes are unchecked

If you do send us comments, feedback, or suggestions, please consider including your name and e-mail details. We read everything you send and, were possible, we will contact those we think we can help.