Wine (the program) does something useful for a change.

For years, I've had the Penguin Hutchinson Library on CD-ROM. This is a lovely little collection of tier-three (sorry, guys, but it's true) reference works like Longman's Dictionary of English, the Hutchinson Encyclopedia, Helicon Book of Days, the Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, and best of all, Roget's Unabridged Thesaurus.

The bulk of the work comes in a file, PHRL96.UMO, which I've been trying to crack for years. It doesn't even seem to be encoded or compressed, but I've never been able to figure out the pointers and internal references that it has, so I'm a little befuddled by it. I'm sure I'd be able to crack it someday; I just haven't given it much thought or time recently.

Anyway, last night I upgraded my version of Wine, the Linux "Windows API Support" layer, and it ran the program perfectly! It's not an ideal solution (an ideal solution would be an open-source program that can read the approximately 200MB database), but it can cut and paste from the Windows clipboard to the X-Windows clipboard, so it's more or less good enough.

The one weird thing is that the process snapshot insists that the Wine application is taking up only 22MB of local memory, but is 3GB in virtual size. This machine only has 1GB of memory total (real plus virtual), so I have no idea what kind of weird magic Wine thinks it's doing.

I'm so old!

So, Yamaraashi-chan got to the end of Guitar Hero, and she asked me, "Dad, what's so important about Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd? They asked me, like, five times if I was really sure I wanted to play it. What's the big deal?"

I mean, how do you explain the cultural significance of Free Bird to a ten year old? The wikipedia page doesn't even begin to cover it.