Friday 31 March 2006

E.T. In 70mm

"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!

Sunday 19 March 2006

Valley of the Wolves - Iraq

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...

Sunday 12 March 2006

Wine System Font & Versions Problem

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.

Thursday 9 March 2006

XMetaL Linux Update

I've been toying with XMetaL on Linux and Wine, with varying degrees of success. It's quite obvious that the XMetaL/Wine/Linux combo isn't ready for prime time just yet, but it's so close.

I've had some interesting problems along the way, most importantly that the Save As function isn't reliable. Or rather, it doesn't work with relative paths. If you want to save a file, but only enter a filename in the dialog, XMetaL says things like "File is read-only" or "File doesn't exist". A little investigating shows that the save component is unable to fill in the correct path to the file, and therefore cannot find the location. This problem is cured by entering a Windows-like path to the file, for example, D:\myfile.xml. (Note that your home directory is D:\ in Wine.)

The absolute path problem can be a character encoding problem (for example, the save component could very well use some weird Windows keymap scheme instead of pure Unicode; XMetaL is supposed to run on Windows 98, an OS not known for its Unicode capabilities) but there are other variables in the equation, too. For one, I suspect that Wine's file path translation also matters.

A lesser, but still annoying, problem is that a saved XMetaL window size (when starting the application) doesn't work at all if you've set Wine to Windows 98 mode. It works more often in Windows 2000 or XP modes, but not every time, which I don't understand at all. Also, XMetaL forgets the view mode (tag view, normal view, etc), for some reason, not necessarily the same.

On the other hand, I've successfully been able to use (most parts of) X4, an XMetaL authoring environment that we developed at Information & Media a few years ago. This is good news since while I can live with writing in OpenOffice, it doesn't beat a real XML editor with a decent authoring DTD and environment.

I expect that Wine 1.0, when out, can solve some of the current problems. I'll keep you posted.