Just upgraded to wine 0.9.12. It broke my XMetaL installation. It seems that wine now wants to handle ActiveX using built-in libraries, but unfortunately the new library either doesn’t implement OLE properly, or there is a bug somewhere. A quick Google search didn’t tell me anything earth-shattering but confirmed that others are having problems as well.

On the other hand, the Debian wine still lags behind; 0.9.14 is the latest version out from Wine HQ.

I talked to a friend yesterday. He works at an IT consultancy that is best left unnamed here, a well-respected one, I might add, and yesterday, they had a job ad in the paper. They have everything, the ad claimed, but they need to grow. They need a few more good men (and women).

My friend and I, we have a mutual acquaintance, a developer who’s one of three or four top developers in his field. He’s also a nice, likable guy, and so my friend recommended him to his bosses at the well-respected IT consultancy. Of course, they asked to see his CV, and so far, so good.

Except they said no. He isn’t what they’re looking for. He’s got the wrong profile.

So I started to think about this, and realized that the people who hire other people are usually the ones who are the least qualified for the job. They’re executives, salespeople, or perhaps HR people in som cases, but most of them have never done any dirty, hands-on work in “their” fields. They lead, and they hire people, and they make executive decisions, all of which is fine and dandy, but they don’t know the details of what their companies do.

Therefore, they shouldn’t be the ones hiring other people. In this case, everyone in the field but the bosses know the value of our mutual acquaintance. We all know he’s top notch, he’s a real find, he’s proven his worth many times over. Yet, the bosses are the ones doing the decisions, and they say no. Why?

A part of what’s supposed to make a leader great is the ability to listen, to trust those working for you. Why is it that this trust is so rarely extended to the employees?

Turns out that once I sorted out the localhost resolution problem, outlined below, wine and everything with it works like a charm. Therefore, today I pressed my luck by reinstalling XMetaL, according to my set of instructions from a February blog entry, and it also works like a charm.

Now I’m anxiously waiting for the Debian maintainers to update wine to the latest version. The unstable wine lags two versions behind…

It turned out that my wine problems, mentioned in previous posts, were pretty easily explainable: Somehow, my local DNS resolution was out of order, meaning that I couldn’t map localhost to 127.0.0.1. wine, just as many other programs, use localhost just about everywhere. All it took was a reconfiguration of my LAN, easily achieved with dpkg-reconfigure etherconf.

…could easily be my last day as a projectionist, as my theatre, the Draken, has its last scheduled commercial screening. It’s at 7 p.m., and it’s a Swedish classic by Bo Widerberg; it’s old, it’s black-and-white, and it’s boring, and for the life or me, I can’t recall its title.

See, the Swedish Film Institute is moving its Cinemateket film classics screenings to the Capitol theatre after eleven years with me and Draken doing their dirty work, and there’s very little I can say about the whole affair without losing the PG rating of this blog.

All of this has come about on a very short notice; a day or two before my theatre’s 50th birthday on April 26, I was still confident that the Draken still had many years left in public service. It was only on the day before the anniversary that I first heard about their plans, and this was an accident. I wasn’t meant to know. Nobody was.

Anyway, if you want to complain, the contact information is easily found at the Swedish Film Institute’s home on the Internet. There are laws against me publishing phone numbers here, apparently.

I suppose all this gives me more time to write.

I mentioned below that I haven’t been able to blog due to technical problems at Blogger. This is not entirely true. Yes, Blogger had problems, but I also have discovered that changing my router’s MTU from 1492 bytes to 1500 bytes makes all of my Blogger-related problems go away, including the intermittent connectivity problems…

Makes me wonder, now. Can my wine problems (also outlined below) be at least partly caused by the router problem? Watch this space.

wine is behaving more and more strangely. The timeouts have continued, and Internet Explorer won’t work properly. It starts, but crashes when it connects to anything outside my LAN.

There are a couple of possibilities here. First of all, I’ve switched to an older ADSL modem/router combo because my D-Link G604T keeps on losing DSL sync every few hours and behaves erratically in between, and so I suspect that this new (well, old) hardware doesn’t like IE on Debian, for some strange reason. (I mean, what’s there not to like?) Second, I’ve upgraded Xorg to 7.something, and the something might interfere with wine. Or it could be any random C library I’ve upgraded recently. I’m a dist-upgrade junkie and I need my fix practically every day.

In any case, I got tired of the whole mess today and removed wine and every Windows application I’ve installed. Yes, folks, that includes XMetaL.

Blogger has been experiencing some problems lately, which is why I haven’t posted anything for awhile. Or maybe they’ve read my blog.

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.