What's The Hacker working on now ?

Majorly expanding CAMlib. This library will be the basis for the CAM8 programming environment. All programs written for use with CAM8 will use CAMlib. I hope to include facilities for data visualization and analysis as well. In the future new releases of the CAM8 programming environment will mostly involve upgrades to CAMlib. Older applications will only have to relinked to take advantage of the new features.
Coding a version of STEP written in Python. This will rely heavily on CAMlib for lowlevel access to CAM8 and speedy implementations of the most common stuff. I'm using SWIG to embed CAMlib in a Python interpreter.
Making XCAM faster and more efficient as well as providing the ability to save images in more formats (GIF, JPEG, TIFF etc) and generate MPEG 2 movie streams on the fly.
Writing all sorts of detailed documentation for all the above... shiver :-(

What are some possibilities for the future ?

Writing a multitasking micro-kernel for CAM8 so many users can timeshare one CAM8 machine.

Writing cam8d so people can connect to CAM8 through a net connection. This will let people customize their programming environment as they wish and hide the details of controlling the hardware behind a well defined, network based interface.