Jan 20
I finally listened to Sebastien Bacher and applied for GNOME commit rights yesterday, after hassling Seb once more about committing an approved patch for me. Surprisingly, it only took some 4 hours until my application was approved and my account created, wow! Apparently 71 patches are enough. 
With my new powers, I fixed a crash in gdm, and applied two stragglers into gvfs’ build system today.
More to come!
Jul 3
In the merciless vendetta for purging hal we now reached another major milestone: gvfs, GNOME’s file system layer which handles USB storage as well as virtual file systems for libgphoto2 cameras, Bluetooth devices, audio CDs, or ftp/sftp/cifs mounts, is now fully ported to libgudev and doesn’t need hal at all any more. These long nights of porting weren’t in vain, after all \o/.
Now I just need to hassle David Zeuthen to apply the patches soon. Of course I couldn’t wait and already uploaded them to Karmic, so please test the hell out of it and let me know about problems.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Halsectomy is a little greener once again.