Slashdot Mirror
ALS Sufferer Used Legs To Contribute Last Patch
krkhan writes "This is a little old, but seeing as it didn't make it onto Slashdot at the time, I think it deserves a headline now. Adrian Hands was suffering from ALS and had lost motor skills when he used his legs to type in Morse code and fix a 9-year-old bug in Gnome. The patch was submitted three days before he passed away."
You know what's important to someone when they continue to do it from their deathbed.
On one hand, I find it awesome that even in that state he managed to do something that productive and leave one (more) lasting trace of himself. On the other hand... I would hope that everyone would find something even more important to do during their last weeks than fix gnome bugs.
Its actually a paddle to the right of his right knee. You can see it attached to a piece of PVC tubing under his desk
All of us like to think that the latest ten-core Xeon or whatever is the neatest thing since sliced bread, but stories like this remind us of what we often forget: the human spirit is the greatest hack of all time.
The family is in grief right now, and my sympathies are with them: but I hope they also understand the beyond-epic level of respect we have for Adrian Hands, and how he demonstrated right until the very end what the hacker ethos is all about. May we all live up to that standard.
Committed members like this, that sacrifice their time and effort, are what keep the open source movement alive and churning out functional code. So in the end, he left the world with a legacy of improving software for everyone else, doing what he loved, and cleaning up loose ends. Can't blame him at all.
There are so many who benefit from the community, and so relatively few who give back. So many people claim some excuse to not contribute anything to anybody without getting paid.
Then there's this guy.
I am honored to have shared a planet with him.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
ALS is Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis It's a form of motor neurone disease, not a nice way to go.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Irony.
ALS or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's Disease.
Quoting from Wikipedia
"[ALS] is a form of motor neuron disease caused by the degeneration of neurons located in the ventral horn of the spinal cord and the cortical neurons that provide their afferent input. The condition is often called Lou Gehrig's disease in North America, after the famous New York Yankees baseball player who was diagnosed with the disease in 1939. The disorder is characterized by rapidly progressive weakness, muscle atrophy and fasciculations, spasticity, dysarthria, dysphagia, and respiratory compromise. Sensory function generally is spared, as is autonomic, and oculomotor activity. ALS is a progressive,[1] fatal, neurodegenerative disease with most affected patients dying of respiratory compromise and pneumonia after 2 to 3 years; although occasional individuals have a more indolent course and survive for many years."
It isn't a computer techie nerd term, it is a medical term. ALS is in the news about as much as MS so I think most folk would reasonably conclude that anyone who crawls out of their personal rut now and then would have heard about it. Also, if you don't know what ALS is then the expansion probably would not help. At one time "Lou Gehrig's" would have been more common than ALS but I think it may be the other way around now.
Google is just a mouse click away.
... the ticket was open for 9 years and the only person who managed to do it was someone who could barely move to even press the keys required to type up the patch.
That's why it took so long.
Yeah, but the real money is in giving old men more hair and boners and reducing teenage acne.
My family and I took care of my father-in-law as he declined and eventually succumbed to ALS in 2004. Every tiny act was monumental, even going out and getting a haircut, or a shaving him, or eating.
I can tell you that motor is the ONLY thing that goes. Pain stays, mental function stays, it is a pretty hellish existance for the sufferer. And something they could do just fine today - gone tomorrow... no predictability to it. And then there are painful muscle spasms as things go wrong. until they finally aren't able to breathe any more and die. I'm glad the mentioned coder was able to find a way to keep going, and put their mark on things.
The main medication at the time (@ $900 a pill), only worked for 18 months at which point your symptoms would be identical to as if you didn't take it - so it slowed things down enough to buy you time to get your affairs in order, and then all the progression caught back up. I don't know about current meds.
What's bothered me is that there is VERY little understanding of the disease, and how you get it - there are risk factors (being in a war is one, so is eating bats in guam). The VA had a HUGE list of questions that sounded like they were just grasping at statistical straws.
meh
Important is a relative term. It's different for everybody. If you're doing something you honestly love, that's not a bad way to spend your last few days.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The patch was reverted in Gnome 3 because someone found it useful.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Yes, but Google is also just a click or a shortcut away for the submitter/editor.
There are many acronyms with different meanings. Anyway, as this here clearly refers to Medicine:
For /. as a news aggregator site (albeit for nerds), it would be nice to explain acronyms which are not common for every nerd. That's one single step for a single submitter/editor—and saves lots of Google leaps by readers.
What bar? This ain't a contest, there's always going to be someone who's better than you.
Personally, I think the only person you are in competition with is you yourself. Are you better than you were a year ago? Then you win.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I just did a quick Google search and found that alternate uses of ALS don't show up until the 8th link; the top 7 are all about Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Acronym overload is only a valid excuse when there isn't an overwhelming preference for one particular usage, or that this usage is not the overwhelming use case for that acronym. Since it is the most common use of the acronym, spelling it out is a bit redundant; submitters and editors here alike should be able to reasonably assume that the vast majority of readers here understand what Google is and how to use it. If readers don't use the tools right in front of them, that is their own fault.
RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.
ALS truly sucks. A friend of mine who's less than a year older than me, we grew up on the same street and have known each other for 50 years now, is dying of it. He was a very vital person, frequently went hunting, avid firearms enthusiast, excellent computer and networking tech, and now he's in a powered chair and almost unable to cough. It's heart wrenching to go to see him, but he appreciates the visit and my wife plays harp for him which he and his wife really enjoy. As we live 500 miles away, we can only visit every 2-3 months.
I've seen a lot of death over the years and lost friends and family to: cancer, strokes, Alzheimers, murder, suicide, vehicular accidents, and now this gets added to the list and it rates pretty high on how I do not wish to go. Your brain is totally unimpaired, but your body is shutting down around you. I thought my life sucked with not having much of an immune system and having to stick four needles in my abdomen for 90 minutes twice a week to get reasonable immunity support, but there's always someone with something worse and it's quite humbling to see it.
Stephen Hawking is perhaps the best known ALS patient (or has something related to ALS), it's amazing that he's lived as long as he has but he's definitely been the statistical outlier. They're now questioning whether or not Lou Gehrig actually had the disease that was named after him.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
... because you might need it later.
Gratuitous plug for a friend's CW site
Yes, it's easy to Google this term. Yes, the reader could have done a search. But writing style standards generally suggest that the abbreviation should be spelled out, then included parenthetically after the full spelling, for abbreviations.
If the editors could be bothered to, you know, edit things for clarity, they could have written:
"[...] Adrian Hands was suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS - also sometimes referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease) and had lost motor skills..."
Look at it this way: if you're a writer, do you want people reading what you wrote, or do you want their focus taken away from your work when they start googling all the medical terms you use? If you don't care about the quality of the summaries, why don't we just turn Slashdot into a giant list of links, with helpful summaries such as "LOL COOL!"?
It only writes dot dash dash dot.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
It's appalling if he had to go to India for treatment because of intractability of the US healthcare system.
Indeed. They used such a setup to write windows ME.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Hawking was diagnosed with ALS before motor neuron disease names became more distinct. Today, what he has is called Spinal Muscular Atrophy, stage 4. ALS is a disease of both the upper (brain into spine) and lower (spine to muscles) nerves. SMA is a purely lower motor neuron disease. The opposite is Primary Lateral Sclerosis, a motor neuron disease of just the uppers. We MNDers stick together, so he's still in our club.
Sadly, his bucket list remained unfinished...
...
...
1 - Make love to wife: check
2 - Say goodbye to family: check
3 - Farewell party with close friends: check
4 - Give to charity: check
5 - Write memoirs: check
86 - Go to Disneyland: check
9032 - Fix Gnome bug: check
9033 - Make peace with Mother-in-Law:
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!