Patrick Volkerding Back to Work

AndreaP writes "Patrick Volkerding, the maintainer of Slackware Linux, is apparently recovering from his health problems and is back to work. From the ChangeLog of Slackware-Current: 'I'm back in California and I'm happy to let you all know that I'm feeling much better. :-) Here are a few updates so you can see that I'm trying to get back into the swing of things. Hopefully 10.1 won't be too far off ...'"

He's back

[psi42]

His health:
Well, I'm back in California and I'm happy to let you all know that I'm feeling much better. :-)

His intelligence:
and then we can look at what exactly needs to be done to try to switch over to the new kernel series for 11, or sometime later on. I still don't think it's time for that yet (it will be best to wait until 2.4 can be abandoned)

And his sense of humor:
It's the closest thing to a blog I've ever done. (ooooo! ;-)



Looks like slackware is back in the running. Welcome back!

Re:So... that's it?

[cipher uk]

changelog [slackware.com]

not exactly what you asked for but it does tell you what happened with him etc.

Re:Impossible!

[Gandalfar]

no worries. I updated it after seeing that comment.

You can still work on improving that sentance though.

Already Updated!

[neoshroom]

You forget that by sending thousands of geeks over to Wikipedia one of them was bound to edit the article. It now contains the update that "On December 19, Slashdot carried the story that he is recovering and returning to work." Eat that turnaround Britannica!

PubMed

[blackula]

Use PubMed as your medical information source. It's where the scientists and docs publish their research and is considering a "real" datasource (as opposed to citing "the internet". Your doctors will know the name Pubmed when you mention it. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi [nih.gov] My daughter has a heart condition and we found the doctors weren't interested in really discussing anything until we started using the "right" terminology. The terminology I picked up after reading a number of PubMed publications about my daugher's condition. I highly suggest that anyone researching any condition (but especially something exotic like Patrick) hit PubMed. Make it your source you cite when talking to your docs. Make it your primary source of information. All the other websites you read are just summing up the papers published here.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really followed the story, here is it in a nutshell (© O'Reilly)

He was horking up things from his lungs that resembled the plaque from teeth. His dad is a dentist and has always had Pat use an electric whirling toothbrush since he was a kid. Pat always wondered where all that plaque-cloud that he was breathing was going to end up. It seems the bacteria in the plaque found a nice home in his lungs, and grew. The designer antibiotics the doctors were giving him had no effect - he needed the classic old school cillins. He got with the classic drugs, and the evil bacteria are losing.

his doc's blog

[davids-world.com]

This seems to be his doctor's cancer blog [weblogsinc.com].

(Like everybody else, I wonder what Patrick's problem turned out to be in the end... )

Re:WTF

[j0d3r]

The "blog" sounds more like a case of what can happen when a hypochondriac has access to too much Internet information without enough medical training. I find it interesting that he was able to self-diagnose a mitral valve prolapse and regurgitation without an echocardiogram (NOT an EKG), pulmonary sulfur granules without a bronchoscopy, decided he needed diagnostics without indications for them, and specific antibiotics without a positive microbial culture (which is hard to get with actinomycosis since it's usually found via exploratory surgery). So the problem was solved by good old Penicillin. Great. It's still an extremely effective drug, but reluctantly prescribed, since others (like cipro )have a wider antimicrobial spectrum, and are less likely to induce resistant strains. Oh, and a word as a dentist- contracting some sort of pulmonary infection from brushing your teeth is extremely improbable under any condition, even immunosuppression. Aerosols from ultrasonic scalers are a different story, but those should never be used outside a dentist's office anyway.