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I wrote the Professional Practice exam for APEGGA on Monday.  It’s not terribly difficult, but it certainly requires you to do the reading they’ve given you.  I’ll get my results in about six weeks.

Well - that about sums it up!

I managed to get the Picasa2 slideshow and timeline functionality working within Wine by adding support for DirectDraw surface locking and faking out some overlay surface capabilities.  It works pretty well, as you can see:

The timeline isn’t stretched to fill the entire window like it would be with a proper overlay stretch implementation.  I think they render to a 640x480 texture and scale it fullscreen to save processing power in their default mode.  The slideshow seems to be fullscreen when the overlay control bar is showing, as you can see in the first screenshot, however.

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.

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: