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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.
Another of the world's many reminders of how fragile life is.
Fare thee well, poor comment. For thou hast been cast out amongst wolves.
From dandelion digital's homepage:
"Leonard is also active in the Cryonics movement, and hosts the domain for Consonance."
Not to be morbid or too sick, but does anyone see the irony of a cryonics enthusiast dying in an accident in ALASKA?
As is often said when an Amiga user passes away, "The Amiga, it will outlive all of us."
Leonard will be missed by many. He was Dandelion Digital's sole proprietor. He also has a page about his Linux acheivements, especially his SCSI drivers which are commonly used today.
http://tomgould.com/
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
Leonard was a hell of a nice guy and will be missed.
And David?
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
The parent post was funny, without being even slightly disrespectful to the memory of a valued member of our community. Humor at a death may bother some, but it can also be cathartic. There is absolutely no justification in modding the parent post as "troll" or "flamebait", and the people who wasted their mod points need some severe attitude readjustment. Please mod the parent back up before you mod me down as offtopic (I have karma to spare, and then some).
There's not much in the FAA report (see below) but it looks like weather wasn't an issue.
-----
IDENTIFICATION
Regis#: 7189T Make/Model: R44 Description: 2000 ROBINSON R-44
Date: 08/29/2002 Time:
Event Type: Accident Highest Injury: Fatal Mid Air: N Missing: N
Damage: Substantial
LOCATION
City: KETCHIKAN State: AK Country: US
DESCRIPTION
2000 ROBINSON 44 HELICOPTER CRASHED IN WINSTANLEY LAKE, LOCATED UPSIDE
DOWN, 2 POB SUFFERED FATAL INJURIES, OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES ARE UNKNOWN,
KETCHIKAN, AK
INJURY DATA Total Fatal: 2
# Crew: 1 Fat: 1 Ser: 0 Min: 0 Unk:
# Pass: 1 Fat: 1 Ser: 0 Min: 0 Unk:
# Grnd: Fat: 0 Ser: 0 Min: 0 Unk:
WEATHER: KTN METAR 08/30/02 0053 UTC 34009KT 10SM SCT040 BKN070
OTHER DATA
Activity: Pleasure Phase: Unknown Operation: General Aviation
Departed: KETCHIKAN, AK Dep Date: 08/28/2002 Dep. Time: 0349
Destination: WINSTANLEY LAKE, AK Flt Plan: NONE Wx Briefing: U
Last Radio Cont: DEPARTING KETCHIKAN
Last Clearance: NONE
FAA FSDO: JUNEAU, AK (AL05) Entry date: 08/30/2002
It seems as if anyone who had a role in developing modern day systems are dieing. Conspiracy, I sure damn hope not. ;-)
I think you've watched "Antitrust" a few times too many.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Slashdot seems to run a lot of obituaries. Perhaps there should be a topic for it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I will never forget how it felt to install Mr. Zubkoff's BusLogic drivers in a 2.0.8 kernel for the first time. Back then, the drivers hadn't yet made their way into Linus' tree. As a veteran of rolling my own kernel, having built X and gotten it up when that was still an accomplishment, and having bled on libc #defines, I settled in for major pain. But Mr. Zubkoff's driver dropped right in. Like butter. The nost seamless thing I'd ever seen. He will be missed, not only for great drivers but also for providing a model of how the Linux community could approach initially reluctant vendors for register-level APIs. Here's to you, sir!
Oh my, it is so freakingly painful to look at the web page of a dead person that, even while you didn't know it, took part at your life...
Actually, there's no evidence that catharsis actually does anything. In fact, it often accentuates feelings, rather then getting rid of them.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It was a Robinson R-44. The R-44 is not a kit, and it's far from a toy. Unfortunately, Robinson's have a huge piece of the statistics pie simply because they're the one rotary wing affordable enough to be used for instruction. And students crash a lot.
Many thanks to *all* of them.
Bet they don't hear that enough...
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
So a guy gets killed in an accident, and so far about 75% of the posts to this story are racist, homophobic, anti-Linux trolls and comments to the effect of "He deserved it" or "I'll bet it was Microsoft." For a group of people that is supposed to be so intelligent (key word there is "supposed"), there are a lot of idiots reading Slashdot. If you don't have anything constructive to say, then either don't say it at all, or save it for the next evolution flamebait story.
.. you don't care. But I'll tell you this: One day, somebody you do care about will die, and I hope that your thoughts are preoccupied with the horrific things that you've posted to this story, and how terrible you behaved. Most /. readers are high school and college kids that wouldn't know the first thing about true loss. That will change with time.
Yeah, I know
Most people here probably know more about Leonard Zubkoff, so why don't I talk a little about David Zampino. Mr. Zampino ("Please, call me Dave") was my boss at the company I worked for during the summer between high school and college. At that time, he was working for RCN, a fairly large ISP. He taught me a great portion of what I know about TCP/IP and routing equipment. He was a great boss; on days with lots of customers calling, he would tell us techs (not just 'let' us; he would say, "Be sure to expense that,"!) to expense pizza delivery if we decided to work through lunch. His focus was always, always on having good customer service. He really wanted the company to have a reputation as being dependable and competent, even if it cost time and money. He also did not have much patience for office politics. One time, a customer called and complained that his Unreal server had suddenly become sluggish, and all the players' ping times had gone up 60 miliseconds. I investigated, found a problem in our routing, and sent an email to the appropriate internal mailing list. When the person in charge of the buggy area fired back a reply chastising my inexperience and ridiculous notions, Dave was on it like a hawk. In less than 15 minutes he, too, had investigated the problem, and wrote to the list both to back me up and to castigate the other manager (albeit in a very diplomatic way) for reflexively 'defending his turf' without even looking into the problem!
I don't know a whole lot about him before that time. Mr. Zampino was the founder of Brainstorm (1990-1991 ish), which started as a hardware company making accelerator cards for Macs. They ended up as a local, business-only ISP (long story) which was eventually bought by RCN, which is how he ended up there. While he may not have been a kernel hacker, he was certainly no slouch in Unix operation and programming, nor in hardware design. Although I have not worked for RCN since the summer of 2000, and I believe he left the company earlier this year, I am sure he is fondly remembered by all his co-workers.
Rest in peace, Dave. I am proud to have had the privilege of knowing you.
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.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I wrote about David Zampino in another comment. I neglected to mention in that post that, in addition to being a chip designer, programmer, and IT manager, David Zampino was also known as 'Bat Dave' in my corner of the office because of his ability to fly small planes and helicopters.
His politeness was certainly notable; I asked him a few questions around the sundry Buslogic combos and he was always helpful and friendly, though I'm sure he'd heard the same questions many times over. A shame to have such a pleasant man pass on so young.
Well, this particular incident makes me think that the Grim Reaper just accidentally clicked on the name column and sorted his to-do list in reverse alphabetical order.
I've used several cards using drivers by lnz@dendelion.com; I think the first 'totally built from scratch to be a Linux server' machine I ever put together used a 53c875 Symbios chip, and he helped me get it running at top speed to show off Linux's speed for a database. This would have been better than 5 years ago, at least. We'd been using Linux a lot longer than that on 'stock' machines, but needed some more 'umph' than we could get, and he was a great resource for support and friendly help. He'll be missed.
Wouldn't it be http://www.fckvwls.com/ then?
For those who don't read METAR (which includes some of us meteorologist), here is the gist:
Temp: 63F/17C
Dewp: 51F/11C
Winds: Northwest at 14mph/12kts
Pressure: 1018.7mb
Sky: mostly scattered or broken between 4000ft/1220m to 7000ft/2135m
Visibility: 10miles/16km
All in all, not a bad day, though it was a little windy. 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.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
As an undergrad at CMU, the CS terminal room was rather evenly split between DEC VT52 and Concept C100 terminals. And then there were the "special" terminals: the Concept-LNZ. These amazing little creatures were a result of Leonard's graduate work. They contained custom firmware that the locally hacked version of Unix Emacs contained special support for. It cached frequently displayed tokens in local (off screen) video memory and exchanged an encoded/compressed token stream with the editor. Working over a 2400 bps serial line was an absolute dream on these. It sped up the editing sessions to an amazing degree.
When I asked Leonard in an e-mail if he was "the" LNZ of Concept-LNZ fame, he was rather flabergasted that someone would remember this over 10 years later. He gradually took over support for the Buslogic driver as he was both a better driver writer and had local access to the Buslogic lab to do testing.
When I read this headline, my gut tied in a very tight knot that will not soon be untangled.
We'll miss you, Leonard.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
Yeesh, just try to be funny...
(Not really directed at you, but rather the moderator who modded down my attempt at humor.)
"Derp de derp."
First of all my condolances to the loved ones of David and Leonard. I never knew either, but from the glowing comments I've read... I wish I had. Unfortunately shit happens. Its part of life. However even though Leonard has passed on, his legacy will be the code he has contributed to linux. From what I've understand that seems to be some extensive work on the scsi system which is no small task in its self. All of this makes me wonder, because of the freedom of his code... his work will live on through others, would this be the case in "non-OS" software? Say Company M has a programmer P who is chiefly responsible for widget W. Now say programmer P passes on and besides maybe a few people who understand the code, who works on W? But if P's work was done to be scrutinized by the masses, that work would continue on. I believe this is one important reason why information should be free. If something happens to the creator, their work can continue on if it has value to someone. It makes me wonder how many people had brilliant ideas, but closely guarded them to the point that they died with them.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Here are some big runon blurbs I tend to write in order to fondly remember and credit someone.
:} I'd just negotiate with him so that he didn't have to end up scrounging together an engineering team to duplicate all of IT's infrastructure. *wink to mobyone and claw*
:}
I was employee number twentysomething (IT admin) at VA Research, and I was interviewed by Larry, Rob, and Leonard. lnz always had time to randomly consult on the spot with employees in terms of engineering or general technology. Whenever he'd breeze through the office (never coming in before afternoon), ya knew he was kickin some ass. He was often seen smiling. He was one of the first people I was personally aware of to really use Linux itself to make a big dent in major industry, through his work with Buslogic and Mylex SCSI controllers. He told me when Adaptec finally stopped disavowing the existance of Linux, they came to VA and said "We're sorry. Can we play with Linux now?" and lnz said, "No. Too late." He'd already schooled them on Linux from the grassroots on up, forcing them to acknowledge an emerging market. I'm sure he was a strong mentor for that driver engineering and reverse engineering community. Man, that takes devotion and patience.
Ya couldn't mess with his workflow. He had like a mini data center and R&D lab at his house, which he relied solely on at all times, telneting home and xhosting his XEmacs display back to the office when we had public IP addresses for all workstations.
Then with the pre-IPO, he had to move his R&D out of his house into the office. This was when we were in the original garage-like Mountain View office next door to SGI North American sales on Shoreline, and our building's resources was about 3 times overcommitted by our growth rate. We had phone lines and ethernet cords draping out of the ceiling down to shared desks in order to accommodate having new employees per week, and I had to figure out how to route power all around the building using very warm and very illegal 14 gauge extension cords from each available power circuit to wherever in the building lnz's engineers needed them. Routed em like some people route ethernet cables. Such as to lnz's new 1 terabyte file server sitting next to my desk, powered by the women's restroom. That server was lnz's baby; you may have seen it at the March 1999 Linuxworld Expo. He blew that circuit that afternoon. Permanently. The women's restroom never worked again. Thanks to his rapidly growing engineering dept and to our new sales dept, the power generator in the back was hot enough to singe your body hair when you opened the door to it. The fsck alone on that event pushed the ship date back a day or more. Yeah he was shipping 1TB RAID servers with ext2.
lnz inadvertantly taught me a lot about fire and safety codes of Mountain View and Sunnyvale, and he taught me the proper use of the word "cryonics" instead of Hollywood's improper use of "cryogenics". He's one super nice guy. Hope to see ya around, lnz.
The Robinson's suffer from a problem that all lightweight heli's do, and that is low rotor inertia. It makes them very twitchy in flight. Unfortunately, it's not just stundent pilots that crash them. A large number of crashes in R-22's and R-44's happen with experienced pilots at the stick. Just last month a FACTORY Robinson pilot crashed a brand-new R-22 in Texas.
The rotors on a Robinson can actually flex enough to strike the aircraft in flight if you over control them.
Leonard made changes to Emacs on ITS and TOPS-10 when he was at CMU, in order to take advantage of the screen buffer controls (insert line, rather than redraw-rest-of-screen, etc.) on the Heath/Zenith H19/Z19 VT52 clone.
Although as everyone knows Leonard later became a strong contributor to free software, these updates to Emacs he placed under a restrictive license, and vigorously protected his code. RMS was quite upset by this, as were some other folks. Although Stallman's tiff with Symbolics over Lisp Machine source access is often cited as the reason he started the GNU project, I believe that his interactions with Leonard over ZEmacs were an even earlier influence.
So, in some sense, we have Leonard to thank for the Gnu project that he later contributed to.
Here is the earliest Usenet mention that Google has (we weren't all big USENET users in those days -- it was mostly UUCP modem-based systems).
Filk was around as a genre before the typo that gave it its name :-) Consonance is an annual music convention in the Bay Area.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Leonard's death was also mentioned at the Worldcon science fiction convention in San Jose. I don't think I know him, but many of the other filk singers did - as his web page says, he's been hosting the web site for the Consonance annual music conventions, and the "dandelion" in his domain name and masthead has become somewhat of an icon for the filk music genre. Lotsa folks knew and miss him.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
lol....
there's something to it...when I saw the name I knew it was someone important, but I couldn't connect the name to the accomplishment. Yeah, Leonard lives on, in my dmesg. What more can a man ask for? as I have watched so many machines boot over the years, names such as his have become so familiar.
Fare the well Leonard, in the great archive in the sky, and be assured that backups will retain your code, forever.
"I feel sorry that he's not going to get a chance to test it out himself."
Leonard was on the Alcor Advisory Board:
http://alcor.org/AboutAlcor/alcorStaff.htm
Since you are not permitted to be a board member unless you are signed up, it's likely he will be suspended, regardless of the situation, unless there is a requirement for an autopsy, and Alcor is unable to get a court order to have the body released.
In general, Alcor is very aggressive in ensuring that its patients get suspended as quickly as possible, and with as little concommitant damage as possible. Everyone doing the work is themselves signed up, and will treat the patient as they themselves expect to be treated.
Even in the case of serious damage, there will be a "best effort" attempt, unless the patient specifies otherwise; from the FAQ ( http://alcor.org/FAQs/ ):
--
Q: What if it is impossible to place me into suspension?
A: The Alcor Cryonic Suspension Agreement has provisions for this possibility. Options are available, including naming secondary beneficiaries to whom funds set aside for suspension can be paid. Many members want their suspension funds going towards efforts focusing on recovering any biological remains whatsoever, regardless of the degree of damage or time elapsed.
--
The person to contact for status should be the Alcor press contact; whether or not they will make information available in this depends wholly on the privacy agreements in place with the patient.
-- Terry
I have nothing but praise for Leonard. He worked diligently on the project, and was always helpful. He had some of the most kickass hardware around (a 4 processor personal box, for example).
Although I have not worked on XFree86 for a while, I'm sure he will be missed.
Andrew
Andrew van der Stock
As much as I despise Linux "advocates" these days
Why is an advocate a bad thing? I advocate a great many technologies when I feel they are the right tool for the job. Have I done something to offend?
Bye, Leonard. You'll be missed.
A URL to a page describing the circumstances of his death, complete with links to the FAA report and where donations in lieu of flowers can be sent can be found at
http://www.puffin.com/puffin/lnz/Leonard.htm.
Leonard was a good friend of mine. He will be missed.
It's a good thing Leonard has done such an excellent job with the drivers - They're mature and won't need TOO much fixing. But who will update them to new kernels/etc? Hopefully someone will take up the slack.
I have a FlashPoint controller. It started acting up after upgrading to a K6-2/500 (from a 300) - It would randomly hang the system. (Timing problem in the driver)
Seems like a total of 3-4 people on the planet had a similar hw combo (A Flashpoint in a higher-speed K6/2) and problems, nonetheless, Leonard had a patch out to fix the problem within a week of the first reports of anything happening. A role model for any other software developer...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Statistically speaking, it's very unlikely that this person is both a Slashdot comment-poster and a friend of a surviving chopper pilot from Vietnam. Very unlikely.
It seems as if anyone who had a role in developing modern day systems are dieing. Conspiracy, I sure damn hope not.
Considering when most of the "big names" got started, it makes sense statistically. Don't worry, though, there's plenty of young coders out there that work hard. Remember that developer kid a few months back who made news because he was a minor?
Get off my launchpad!