Following Sean's lead, I am going to try to post about gaim with at least some consistency. It likely will not be great frequency, because my time for gaim has been reduced, but I can still offer a few thoughts that might have wider interest.
Of particular note in my mental stack of ideas recently are a pair of novell fixes. Novell is usually an invisible protocol. I usually hear very little about it, and we usually have very little to do with it. Some of this is because most of the code behind it was donated by Novell.
But lately, novell users have been coming out of the woodwork. Many of them cannot connect using the betas, and some of them, the solaris users, are crashing. Subversion revisions 17318 and 17319 fix these flaws. The changes are isolated within the novell code, so users wishing to try these patches withe 2.0.0 beta3.1 can grab them, make the relevant changes, recompile, and should be good to go.