I'm listening to Mingus and reading countless entries at Skipping Dot Net, the ironically-named weblog of Shane McChesney.
As to Mingus, I like what I once described to someone as his post-Ellington compositions -- on the disc I'm listening to (the Ken Burns jazz collection, borrowed from the Denver Public Library) that would include things like "Haitian Fight Song", "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat", "Peggy's Blue Skylight", and "Solo Dancer". I can do without tracks like "Original Faubus Fables" and "Eat That Chicken", but at his best Mingus is someone I like quite a bit (I also borrowed a few Thelonius Monk discs from the library today, as well as the incredible solo piano recordings by Mary Lou Williams, on which I've commented previously).
As to Shane McChesney, not only does he understand open-source software, he also understands what it means to keep the customer satisfied. And he can write! To top it all off, he gets Jabber and he sees where it fits into what I like to call the open-source ecosystem. Check out that second link, because if Shane is right that "The Interesting Stuff Happens In The Intersections", then there are a lot of interesting projects out there to be pursued in connecting Jabber to important technologies like Zope, Python, weblogging, open-source databases, RSS (where have you gone, RSS-Agent or Meerkat-Transport?), SOAP, and XML-RPC. We in the Jabber community have a lot of work to do!
Speaking of the Jabber community, we've had a valuable exchange in the last 24 hours on the JADMIN list, in a thread entitled open source or a candle in the wind? As might be expected, I jumped right in, describing my perspective on things Jabber. We definitely need to improve, but for me the main thing is finding more contributors and getting good coders and thinkers excited about integrating Jabber with the aforementioned technologies. We also need to consolidate some of our gains, for example by creating some core standards for Jabber clients as well as documenting our protocols. Our IETF submission was a big step forward but there is much more to be done....