Welcome to Energy Aware

This morning we launched Power Manager 3.7.2. This update includes a serious bug fix and a few minor improvements. It is available immediately.

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.

Power Manager includes a trick that allows you to nicely log out a fast switched user.

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.

Let us know why and help us focus on your needs.

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.

A few moments ago we launched Power Manager 3.7.1. This update includes a serious bug fix and a couple of minor improvements. It is available to buy and download immediately.

Power Manager 3.7.1

Power Manager 3.7.1 is free for existing users of Power Manager 3 and highly recommended.

Changes in Power Manager 3.7.1

• Improved syslog logging support.
• Improved removal experience.
• Fixed a rare bug in daily trigger calculation.