I've made a lot of progress since September in getting vmips to boot Linux 2.4; in fact, I think the only missing piece now is proper interrupt-driven I/O support in my DZ11 serial chip emulation.
These days I spend the bulk of my time (at work, that is) working on a very nice compiler system called LLVM. It has recently been released under the U of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License. Anyone who's interested in compilers should have a good look at it; it makes writing program transformations a lot nicer than with traditional systems.
I've been messing around a little bit with Objective-C and Apple's Xcode and Interface Builder systems. They're pretty impressive. I worry a bit about Objective-C though; I get the feeling that its various implementations may have diverged more than is appropriate. This year I think I will try to learn SmallTalk.