[maemo-developers] Power management is going to drive me mad!

[From: George Nachman]

Hi maemo-developers,

Is it possible on the N800 to programatically shut down the wifi
interface and bring it back up?

I have an application that very occasionally needs network
connectivity. If I leave my device connected to wifi, the battery dies
too quickly. I would like to have the software turn on the wifi
interface, do its thing, and then turn the interface off to conserve
energy. I've considered other solutions, but I think this is the
simplest answer.

I thought at first that libconic could do this, but it appears not (at
least not in Python: see the comment here:
https://garage.maemo.org/svn/pymaemo/packages/python-conic/branches/chinook/tests/test_disconnect.py).
Is it possible? I saw a veiled reference to sending d-bus messages
(http://maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2007-April/009462.html),
but it wasn't specific enough to turn into code.

I tried running /etc/init.d/wlancond stop, but that doesn't seem to
decrease power consumption.

Is there a magical dbus message I can send? If I could trick it into
entering/exiting flight mode, that would work too. I've been
experimenting for hours with no luck.

Thanks for your help,
George