Whenever I have the Hamster panel applet enabled, PowerTop reports 88-90 wakeups/s to a "python" process that is Hamster. This is a significant power hog for laptops working on battery power.

Strace of the process reveals a continuous poll() loop with a short timeout:
poll([{fd=5, events=POLLIN}, {fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=8, events=POLLIN}, {fd=13, events=POLLIN}, {fd=15, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=17, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=19, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=7, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=21, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=23, events=POLLIN}], 14, 0) = 0 (Timeout)
read(4, 0x1967d04, 4096)                = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)

At first I suspected some internal Hamster GTK timer, but this seems not to be the case; there are only two timers used in Hamster code: a 20ms animation timer and some 60s timer. I verified myself that the chart animation timer is not being ran at this time.

Powertop output:

     PowerTOP version 1.11      (C) 2007 Intel Corporation

Cn                Avg residency       P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running)        ( 1.8%)         1.81 Ghz     0.1%
C0                0.0ms ( 0.0%)         1.80 Ghz     0.1%
C1 mwait          0.0ms ( 0.0%)         1200 Mhz     0.0%
C2 mwait          0.2ms ( 0.0%)          800 Mhz    99.9%
C4 mwait          5.9ms (98.2%)

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 167.4    interval: 15.0s
no ACPI power usage estimate available

Top causes for wakeups:
  42.5% ( 88.1)            python : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup) 
  28.5% ( 59.1)       <interrupt> : extra timer interrupt 
   8.7% ( 18.1)     <kernel core> : hrtimer_start_range_ns (tick_sched_timer) 
   7.8% ( 16.3)       <interrupt> : PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad 
   4.6% (  9.5)       <interrupt> : ata_piix
   2.6% (  5.3)     <kernel core> : hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)