I saw this morning that my friend data has joined up. Cool. I'm looking forward to seeing his open source sequencer, BINARS, released. He's been putting a lot of time into it. Check out his home page for more info.
I'm considering putting some effort into GnuCash. I am currently a Quicken "poweruser", but I'd prefer to use something that wasn't quite as proprietary. Intuit doesn't even provide cross-compatibility between their Mac and their Windows versions of Quicken! I'd love to see GnuCash running on MacOS X - since the underlying kernel is BSD, the engine ought to compile without any problems - then it'd just be a matter of writing a Cocoa-based frontend.
My research is progressing. I have nice pretty pictures of my first nanoindentation simulation. I am fairly sure the indenter code is working "as advertised" on a serial job. Now I have to convince the boss of this, so I can test it on a parallel job.