GNOME
Since my last post, 2.2 was released, and it totally rocks. I can't say how proud I am of all the gnome hackers, translators, and testers. Some really great improvements were made, and I think it turned out really nice. This was the first time I was involved through the entire cycle. Lots of fun. I'm still hacking, though not as much now. Contributed some small things to epiphany. It's a pretty sweet browser, even if it's early in development. You should try it.
So, the shit hit the fan on gnome mailing lists the last couple days over D-BUS. Basically, a lot of people are upset that another (non-standard) IPC framework is being created. It's easy to understand that position, as you would think the world would have enough of them by now. However, people are largely ignoring the fact that the KDE folks are willing to use D-BUS (apparently, it's very similar to DCOP). It seems there is also a high chance of using it in systems-level stuff on linux, which would be really great as well. There are some incredibly talented hackers working on it, so if people can get past the knee-jerk reaction of "new IPC mechanism?! eeek!", I think it will be a huge success. That said, I'm using it for my FAM replacement, so I'm putting my code where my mouth is, so to speak.
School
The "foundations" CS class that was kicking my ass so hard at the beginning of the semester is getting easier for me now, so that's good. I'm really enjoying my math class, which is a first for me (maybe it's because I get to code in it). Also, the course listings for next fall came in the mail this week. It feels totally weird that I'm not going through it planning what I'm going to take.