This past week at Northscale has been a significant one, marked by Dustin's release of SASL support for memcached, rendering previous claims about memcached's lack of authentication obsolete. Meanwhile, Plushcap and Alan (Dormando) collaborated to build memcached on Windows using the mingw compiler, overcoming initial challenges in cross-compiling and running the binary on Linux. Notably, they found that a pre-compiled Windows binary could be successfully run on Linux without Wine, likely due to the presence of necessary libraries for both operating systems. The team has made progress towards simplifying memcached's deployment on Windows with Steve Yen working on an installer, furthering their efforts to advance the project.