grack.com

2005 February

Picasa2 under Wine

Picasa2 seems to run great under Wine.  The one issue so far is the corrupted fonts for the album headers: 

Upgrading to the latest Wine CVS seems to fix that problem - here’s some cool shots from the program under Wine:

Some of the features don’t work, like printing or mailing photos.  I’m not sure how much of the MAPI stuff Wine has re-implemented, but that’s likely why it’s not working.

Good Green Vehicle News in Canada Budget

Buried within the 2005 Canadian government budget is a comprehensive section on “green plans”.  One of the interesting hilights is the promise of a “feebate” for energy-efficient cars (and a possible levy on more polluting vehicles).  There isn’t a lot of detail about this plan, but it’s certainly a welcome change:

QEMU Gains Kernel Support

Fabrice Bellard has recently added kernel monitor support to QEMU (The QEMU Accelerator Module, or kqemu), allowing it to execute simple instructions natively on the CPU - much like other virtualization tools like VMware do. 

The speed improvement is dramatic and places QEMU near the the top with other virtualization technologies, though it lacks the high-quality GUI and administration tools of the other enterprise products.  Best of all, it’s completely free!