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.