I've got so many projects on the go, it seems like I'm not getting anything done. I guess I should blog more often as well, because this is a pretty long post.
I'm currently building a Xen server for the California Community Colocation Project people. It should be ready soon. You can read more about it on the Wiki. I bought a APC MasterSwitch on EBay, which I wanted to set up, and donate to the colo (which would really help out my little Xen server project). It took me a few days to get together all the tools and parts to build a custom serial cable, and then I discovered that the damn thing was broken, and I'll have to send it back or get it fixed or something.
I'm still plugging together my little blog-based build/test environment. I'm using it internally at Digeo for my own personal builds. I've got a bit more things to tidy up on it, and then I think I'll set one up on the outside so I can use it for Kaffe builds and testing.
At work, I set up a some customs daemons (from Berkeley pmake) on our build cluster, so I can now build the toolchain and RPMs I maintain in under 2 hours (vs. the 5.5 hours it used to take).
On my own server, I'm still slowly setting up infrastructure. I figured out how to set up some private network bridges in Linux, and I set up OpenVPN so I could connect into it. It's pretty nice from a security and management perspective. I also set up a little JSPWiki for my business (no website currently). It's been really handy for jotting down and organizing all the random ideas I have. I'm going to try to organize my time around a "project pipeline", so I'll have some regular output for everybody to check out. There's a lot of really cool technology happening right now that I want to explore, and this will give me a way to participate more than I have been.
I'm still doing Japanese classes at Soko Gakuen in SF. I've completed 3 courses so far, and I'm currently taking "Beginning 2". I've learned Hiragana and Katakana, and I'm starting to do a little self-study to learn Kanji. It's definitely getting more interesting as I'm able to comprehend more and more things. San Francisco is a great place to learn Japanese, since there's such a huge Japanese community here. Japantown (Nihon-Machi) in SF is particularily nice, since they've got the huge Kinokuniya bookstore, plus lots of other little boutiques, grocery stores and restaurants. Plus you can always pick up things like the local BaySpo newspaper to practice reading.
It's been amazing watching the progress on Matt Mackall's Mercurial project. Major projects, such as Xen, are already using it. I think I'll play around with it to see if it makes sense for Kaffe. It's written in Python, so maybe it would run on Jython, which could run on Kaffe, which would be quite cool, I think.
I've got to look at moving the Kaffe website to a wiki soon as well.
I finally started to use a online RSS aggregator (Bloglines) to subscribe to my blogs. I should have done that a long time ago. The downside is that I'm finding so much cool stuff to read about, I'm getting less work done. The coolest thing I found recently is this Google Maps Pedometer, which is just perfect for figuring out how far I went on a recent run or bike ride.
Congrats on the patent stuff in Europe. Maybe I should move there - your politicians seem more sane. :-)
I think I'm just more depressed than surprised about the bombings in London. I've got friends there, and even heard of a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend that was injured. It's a nasty world we live in, sometimes.