RIP: Leonard Zubkoff

UnidentifiedCoward writes "LWN.net has a link to a blurb at KTVA, "Alaska State Troopers have recovered the bodies and released the names of two men killed late last week in a helicopter crash in Southeast. They are 38-year-old David Zampino of Fairbanks and 45-year-old Leonard Zubkoff of Crystal Bay, Nevada." Mr. Zubkoff was a linux kernel developer and the maintainer of BusLogic and DAC960 projects." Leonard was a hell of a nice guy and will be missed.

Comments

Re:Moment of Silence

[TowerTwo]

I had something insightful to say, but it seems silly now. I rely on his driver for all the data that matters to me. Picture of my son from birth to today and all the code I have written and kept in my years. It was his DAC960 driver and the fact that Mylex seemed to respect the driver enough to point you to his page for Linux support that made me choose Linux over Solaris a few years ago for a set of large arrays.

His contributions will truly be missed by me and I am sure many others.

Steven

Bummer. And thanks.

[MissMyNewton]

As much as I despise Linux "advocates" these days, I remain in awe and appreciation of the coders who just make stuff work .

Many thanks to *all* of them.

Bet they don't hear that enough...

Who fills the Void?

[LinuxGeek]

I met Leonard a few times and he took the time to listen to my questions and explain some of the intricate details of his raid drivers. He was like most of the Linux developers that I've met, which means he was happy to share what he knew and I really appreciated that quality. A simple question: Who will replace Leonard in this community? I don't have the skill, but hopefully others can fill the void.

Re:Who fills the Void?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope to say this without coming off as rude or insenstitive, but this does bring up a question of human fault-tolerance in the open-source development model.

When a company has reduced coders to interchangeable parts (the wisdom of doing so not being under discussion here), if one is unable to function any longer for whatever reason, he can be replaced. What happens when an extremely knowledgeable and unique individual in open-source passes on and leaves this void?

Re:Who fills the Void?

[LinuxGeek]

funny. most linux developers i've met tell me "RTFM".

I think the response returned is proportional to the stupidity of the question asked. When I was asking Leonard questions about an approach to raid optimizations, his response was that he sacrificed some code clarity for optimization. I didn't ask something that was in TFM. At the same conference (1998), someone in front of 1500 people asked Linus when the kernel source tree would be compilable out of the /usr/src/linux tree. Linus answered that that was already the case, that his tree's aren't in the /usl tree at all. The questioner replied with 'Ummm.. Thanks.". That is the kind of question that usually gets the RTFM or 'search the kernel archives' type answers.

Most technical people don't seem to have the patience to respond nicely to dumb questions, but I have seen exceptions.

Re:FAA Preliminary Accident Report

[Cecil]

Actually, the weather could well have been a factor.

While the METAR doesn't explicitly state that there was any icing conditions, that is certainly not a confirmation that there were none. Especially if the pilot was flying through some of the scattered clouds that were 4,000 feet above ground level. That's a very quick way to pick up a lot of ice.

And I doubt that Robinson 44 had anything more than meagre de-icing equipment at best.

I will concede that there was likely some mechanical failure contributing to, if not causing the accident, but it doesn't mean you can rule out the weather entirely.

Re:The Actual Weather Report

[The Wing Lover]

I do agree with an above post that icing COULD be a possibility, but with a surface temp as warm as it was, they would have to be flying pretty high.

Huh? A surface temp of 17 celcius is the perfect temperature for forming carbueretor ice. The air cools 15-20 degrees in the carbueretor as it rushes through the venturi tube. Of course, as soon as this starts to happen, the process accelerates, since the ice effectively narrows the venturi tube, making the air even colder in there.

Ironically, when the surface temp is near or below freezing, carb icing ceases to be an issue, since the air in the venturi is so cold that ice crystallizes quickly before the moisture gets on the walls of the venturi. However, at this temperature you need to wtart worrying about surface icing (does surface icing affect helicopters? I only fly planes.)