Hamakor
Still trying to get the formalities done with. We tried to get gby's DIY stamp to say "Hamakor - Israeli Society for Free and Open Source Software (registered society) - 58-040-213-9", which is the minimum required by law, but we ran out of room. Next time we try to start an NPO, we'll pick a shorter name for it if it means opening up the Open Source vs. Free Software fights all over.

I gave the first of two lectures at Haifux, and the slides are available at my home page in PDF format. The PDF size was HUGE. I think I'll try to regenerate it with a smoother background. The lecture itself went down pretty well. I stopped talking at precisely the alloted time, and there was half an hour of questions afterwards. I think that's a good sign.

My new role as a freelance is progressing much much better than I have ever dared dream. I am getting work orders, and am not idle for one second. This has reached the point where I look at WINE and say to myself that I need to find some time to work on it. I bought shemesh.biz and sshemesh.com, and moved my site there. Going to the old site at consumer.org.il will redirect you to the new site. .htaccess and mod_rewrite strike again.

WINE
I have done some work on wineboot, which is crucial for installers to work (it handles all of those actions that take place after reboot, as Windows is incapable of completing everything without a reboot due to locked files). Wineboot is still missing some minor functionality (running windows 3.1 type startups), as well as being automatically called every time wine is started. Problem is that there are a couple of BiDi features I want to put in before the next release, and last time Alexander announced a release the second wineboot was commited.

On the BiDi front, I am currently working on the font dialog. I'm adding charset selection to it. This is more of a "multilingual" thing than a BiDi thing, but still necessary.
Windows is a tangled mess of strange design decisions coupled with dead weight. The font dialog's sample text is in the resources as a control that is not visible. The information for this control is then taken as the rect coordinates where the text should be drawn manually. Then, there is another control, which is visible, but contains no useful display. There is some indication that the Windows code moves it around, but it doesn't seem to draw anything in it.

I can speculate that this control is there for application provided resources to put info there, and Windows will maintain it, but who is supposed to put info there if the entire piece of mess is undocumented, and windows doesn't put it there itself?

I have been contacted by a company that played around with Linux internally, and now they want to ship a Linux based product, and are confused by the legal implications of doing so. This happened even before I started really advertising myself as a consultant. Let's hope this manages to turn into business. Let's also hope that this is a sign for things to come.