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RIP: Leonard Zubkoff
Posted by
chrisd
on Wed Sep 04, 2002 08:18 PM
from the we'll-miss-you-friend dept.
from the we'll-miss-you-friend dept.
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.
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Once again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cryonics enthusiast (Score:3, Funny)
"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?
The Amiga. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Amiga. (Score:2)
No disrespect to the platform, which even today has yet to be surpassed by PCs in some ways, but you can't exactly go to Best Buy and pick up the latest 68070-powered Amiga PC with optional firewire video toaster add-on.
Re:The Amiga. (Score:3, Informative)
cat
***** BusLogic SCSI Driver Version 2.1.15 of 17 August 1998 *****
Copyright 1995-1998 by Leonard N. Zubkoff <lnz@dandelion.com>
Configuring BusLogic Model BT-930 PCI Ultra SCSI Host Adapter
Firmware Version: 5.02, I/O Address: 0xDC00, IRQ Channel: 10/Level
PCI Bus: 0, Device: 10, Address: 0xDFFFF000, Host Adapter SCSI ID: 7
Parity Checking: Enabled, Extended Translation: Enabled
Synchronous Negotiation: FUUFFFF#, Wide Negotiation: Disabled
Disconnect/Reconnect: Enabled, Tagged Queuing: Enabled
Driver Queue Depth: 255, Scatter/Gather Limit: 128 segments
Tagged Queue Depth: Automatic, Untagged Queue Depth: 3
Error Recovery Strategy: Default, SCSI Bus Reset: Enabled
SCSI Bus Termination: Enabled, SCAM: Disabled
*** BusLogic BT-930 Initialized Successfully ***
Target 2: Queue Depth 3, Synchronous at 20.0 MB/sec, offset 8
Target 3: Queue Depth 3, Synchronous at 6.67 MB/sec, offset 15
Current Driver Queue Depth: 255
Currently Allocated CCBs: 28
[snip]
Linux Driver programmer will be missed my many (Score:5, Informative)
Two people died (Score:4, Insightful)
And David?
Re:Two people died (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if you knew him, you should say something. If you didn't, it's kind of hard to say anything but "I'm sure David was a great guy too!" or "Any friend of a kernel developer is a friend of mine!"
Re:Two people died (Score:2)
Re:Two people died (Score:4, Insightful)
Leonard was a hell of a nice guy and will be missed.
Reply:
And David?
Of course, but not on slashdot
Lets face it, Leonard was a part of our community, David to my knowledge was not. His communities will miss him too, but not on slashdot.
Parent
Leonard Zubkoff is also notable... (Score:5, Interesting)
FAA Preliminary Accident Report (Score:5, Informative)
-----
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
Re:FAA Preliminary Accident Report (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
The Actual Weather Report (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:The Actual Weather Report (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Obit topic (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obit topic (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Obit topic (Score:2)
Slashdot seems to run a lot of obituaries. Perhaps there should be a topic for it.
With what icon?
Some of the most obvious choices seem like the worst. I don't want some cheezy grim reaper cartoon. A tombstone is just morbid. There must be some better way to represent a lifetime of accomplishment.
Something earthy (from nature, not cyberspace) and subtle. Perhaps footsteps in the sand.
Re:Obit topic (Score:2)
One to Emulate (Score:3, Insightful)
His Gods have him well (Score:2, Insightful)
Bummer. And thanks. (Score:5, Interesting)
Many thanks to *all* of them.
Bet they don't hear that enough...
The fuck is the matter with you people? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I know
Re:The fuck is the matter with you people? (Score:2)
I wouldn't get too hyped up over it. It's mostly a bunch of AC's. If somebody were to say that shit with their registerred nick, then I'd really start worrying about how intelligent people here think they really are.
About David Zampino (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:About David Zampino (Score:2)
Re:About David Zampino (Score:2)
Irreverence has a time and a Place (Score:2)
One reader noted that joked a time of death are cathartic, and that holds true and the particular post was well met.
99% of the posts were legit, guy telling the story how the data he is looking at currently is brought by a driver one of the newly departed wrote... Another post told how he worked under one and has fond memories of him being a nice guy.
But there are still posts slamming them as Windows usrers, arguing about Amigas, etc.
Life does go on Slashdot. But you know death does too. Lets remember that, AC's, or just plain assholed. Time and a place for everything.
Puto
Cryonics? (Score:2)
A good man lost... (Score:2)
A real pleasure to work (remotely) with LNZ (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Concept LNZ! (Score:3, Informative)
Bye, Leonard. You'll be missed.
Power of Open Source (not flamebait or troll) (Score:4, Insightful)
lnz was cool (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:lnz was cool (Score:5, Informative)
I really am sorry to hear of Mr. Zubkoff's death, and I certainly do not wish to disrepect him, but this comment is totally and completely wrong. I was one of the Adaptec guys in that meeting. The conversation was something like this:
We're working on officially supporting Linux. One thing that we noticed is that the Linux SCSI layer really, really, really sucks. We'd like to rewrite it, but we need your political support.
I agree that the SCSI layer needs to be fixed, but I'd rather fix it myself than support you. Goodbye.
There was no "schooling us on Linux from the grassroots up", only a rather rude snub at our offer to make Linux better. That was 15 months ago, and we haven't seen any significant progress towards fixing the SCSI layer, other than the patches for bugfixes that we come up with and submit ourselves.
You attempt to troll Adaptec for something that you obviously were not a part of is not appreciated. Look at all of the SCSI vendors out there and tell me which gives better support for Linux? All of our drivers are GPL and we give bug fixes back to the community when we find them. What's your problem?
Parent
Re:lnz was cool (Score:5, Informative)
To respond to your semi-relevant and personally misconstrued tangent, Adaptec had been utterly uninvolved with Linux up to that point in time, and the Linux drivers were very low end even though the community had done an awesome job of reverse engineering them without Adaptec's help. Immediately before joining VA, I was in 3rd level support at Netcom Hosting which consisted exclusively of Adaptec 2940UW's on Linux, and we had to disable every advanced feature just to keep them booted. I later worked with a guy who had previously been a project manager at Adaptec and who described to me the horrors involved in trying to get Adaptec's management to acknowledge the basic relevance of the existance of IEEE1394, and who concurred that they had been unconcerned with Linux at the point I mentioned.
The open source community's unstoppable ingenuity is what forced a lot of companies in general to pay attention to Linux's virtues in order to eventually remain relevant. That's all I meant. It was a comment about lnz's personal tenacity in his memory as a community icon, not an orthagonally correct industrial analysis.
The first half of your comment was relevant and appreciated though. I don't have the anonymous bitterness and cynicism required to contend in Slashdot discussions, so have a nice day and please move on.
Parent
Leonard and Emacs / Richard Stallman and GPL (Score:4, Informative)
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 [google.com] 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).
Re:Moment of Silence (Score:5, Interesting)
His contributions will truly be missed by me and I am sure many others.
Steven
Parent
Who fills the Void? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who fills the Void? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Most technical people don't seem to have the patience to respond nicely to dumb questions, but I have seen exceptions.
Re:Moment of Silence (Score:2)
shoot the moderators! (Score:2)
"cathartic" (Score:2)
Re:All these deaths (Score:2)
I think you've watched "Antitrust" a few times too many.
Re:All these deaths (Score:2)
Re:Toy copter? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Toy copter? (Score:2, Informative)
The rotors on a Robinson can actually flex enough to strike the aircraft in flight if you over control them.
Re:What was David Zampino known for? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The what? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cryonics - Hmmmm? (Score:2)
(Not really directed at you, but rather the moderator who modded down my attempt at humor.)