I read wingo's lamenting against bonobo. Around 2001, Bonobo was quite trendy, and I spent quite some time playing with it, I even wrote some tutorials etc. (translated in to korean!). I read the Henning-book, I read the Don Box book, I read the OMG specs, and in the end, CORBA is not *that* hard (although it _is_ complex). Well, Bonobo makes CORBA a lot easier by hiding a lot of boilerplate, but not satisfied with that, I wrote some elisp to make creating Bonobo-objects ReallyEasy(tm).
Of course, if some technology requires two layers of sugar coating, it *is* complex. And you have to wonder if the complexity was really necessary, if it was really worthwhile. Well... looking back, I *do* think there is too much complexity in the system. Too many things can/will go wrong.
So scrap it all and replace it by D-BUS? Not so easy... For example, can we use D-BUS for communicating with DSO-objects? How to implement all the Stream/Storage stuff? How to replace the whole activation infrastructure?
Replacing something like Bonobo requires a lot of care. Yes - the system is overly complex, but a replacing system could quickly grow just as complex. D-BUS could make some of the things Bonobo does a *lot* easier; but AFAICS (and I am no Bonobo expert and a lot less D-BUS expert), some of the other things would be quite hard to realize with D-BUS, without creating a new monster. (E.g. D-BUS as the new IIOP, with the same complexity on top, but a lot slower...)
tbb
Thankfully, not all things in the world are so hard, and I released a new version of my little Python hack for view teletekst-pages; check my Dutch-language blog for details and pretty pictures, or go straight to the code (requires Python 2.3 and pyGtk).
sendxmpp
Finally, I wrote a little program which makes sending XMPP-messages (Jabber) very similar to using mail(1) for sending, well, mail. Now, the servers I maintain send me IM when they need my help... E-mail is soooo 20th century...