I’ve had some weird wine timeouots lately. My Windows apps take up to two minutes to start. It could be my recently upgraded Xorg but I’m not sure… Stay tuned.

Göteborg Film Festival just added a third E.T. screening to celebrate the Draken theatre’s 50th anniversary on April 26, at 7 p.m. Stay tuned; I’ll update with further details when I have them.

I had an interesting conversation about blogging a while ago. A friend of mine who also blogs suggested that I’d get more readers if I’d focus on a select few topics instead of, well, writing whatever crosses my mind. I’ve thought about it, and it’s probably true.

I’d probably get the Linux/XML geeks interested if I focused on Debian and getting my favourite XML tools to run on wine. I’d get the movie buffs if I wrote regularly on the classics I screen at the Draken every week, and I might even get some of the Aspies out there if I gossiped on Wrong Planet more. And there are dozens of other subjects I could focus on, stuff that I know enough about to write blogs.

But you know what? I don’t care. I don’t write this to satisfy any particular group out there. I write because it’s a great way to let out steam while honing my writing skills. If a post can help someone to set up XMetaL on Linux, well, good for you, but that’s not why I write. I write because I like to write, and blogging is better than hiding the results in drawers.

Those of you who speak Swedish, on the other hand, can jump to my Swedish-language blog, where I actually try to stay on topic. It’s my commentary on local stuff, the kind that only matters to the Swedish-speaking population.

As for the rest of you, well, WYSIWYG!

I rather like “Fanny & Alexander”, director Ingmar Bergman’s final theatrical epic. It’s a classic story of evil, with great actors and stunning, Academy Award-winning photography by Sven Nykvist. However, once is quite enough, and I’m painfully aware of this since I still have 4 reels to go. I love being a movie projectionist but I’d pick Arnold Schwarzenegger any day if I got to choose when doing my time in the booth.

The daytime soap that is Wrong Planet continues. I heard that other members have been banned from the site as well, and in the mean time, again a thread was deleted, this time the one that got me banned. The “owner” is cleaning house, blindly following advice from The Admin Zone, a forum for forum owners and such.

Obviously, I no longer wish to link to WP from my blog, and so removed the link.

Wrong Planet, the AS/autism forum I’ve been reading, is heading for disaster. Today, I became a persona non grata there after daring to compare the latest developments on the forum with a bad daytime soap. Now, this in itself is hardly a disaster; most people there won’t probably even notice that I’m gone. However, it also seems that Alex Plank, the site’s owner, today fired every moderator and every admin in sight. With more than 4000 members, this is certainly a recipe for disaster.

WP is therefore now more of a soap opera than ever before. And it’s still a bad one.

Well, like the header says, wine 0.9.10 fixes the annoying disappearing system font problem in wine 0.9.9. Finally! I’ve been holding back a full Debian dist-upgrade until the wine libraries catch up with what I need…

Unfortunately, the file path problem is still very much in existence. Stay tuned, though, because I just checked Wine HQ and it turns out that version 0.9.11 just came out.

“My” theatre, the Draken, will turn 50 on April 26. To celebrate, we’re going to screen E.T., in 70mm! If you happen to attend a school in the Göteborg area, I think you should bug your teachers until they give in and contact Skolbio Göteborg for free tickets. You won’t regret it!

As I write this, I’m screening the turkish film Valley of the Wolves – Iraq, a controversial account of what happened after 11 Turkish soldiers were abducted by American troops near the Iraqi border. The abduction as such actually occured; what happens later in the film probably falls under an artistic license of some sort.

Be as it may, the Americans are supposedly less than happy about the film while Turks line up for seeing the movie, the most-seen film in Turkey, ever. At least, this is what I’ve been told by the enthusiastic Turks in the audience tonight.

I love controversial stuff, and the film appears to deliver more than its share of that. Unfortunately, a Swedish premiere isn’t more likely than an American one…

I upgraded my wine version to 0.9.9-1 the other day and discovered that some system fonts used by wine for Windows dialogs went missing. The dialogs opened without any text whatsoever in the various GUI objects, including the all-important XLink dialog in my X4 XMetaL installation.

This was very annoying and rendered X4 unusable.

I did some research on Google, without coming up with anything particularly conclusive, so I downgraded to version 0.9.8-1 (winelib had to be downgraded as well, of course, as the library version follows the main package version), and the font problem went away.