The Author of Ping is Reported Dead 148
Wedman writes: "This is in the Nanog Archive, dated 2000-11-21:
'Mike Muuss, the author of the PING program used on networks everywhere, died last night in a traffic accident on US route 95 in Maryland. He was an alumnus of Johns Hopkins." Seems appropriate on Thanksgiving to thank a man who created something that we all rely on every day.
... (Score:2)
If you hadn't noticed, Mike received the lifetime achievement award from USENIX in 1993.
http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ [army.mil]
--Garthnak
My condolences (Score:5)
This is sad news to read, regardless of whether or not its thanksgiving. May we all remember his name each time we use ping.
As for all of you who are cracking jokes about his death, I don't think they are funny at all.
Kindest regards,
Nathaniel G H
Re:PICTURE OF MIKE MUUSS (Score:1)
Mike was a great man, and a good friend.
He'll be tremendously missed!
James E. Nash [mailto]
Re:/. (Score:1)
The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
Re:Huh? Where? (Score:2)
No, I-95 runs from Maine to Florida. I drive it from Massachusetts to Maryland and vice versa whenever I visit my parents...
--
Re:My condolences (Score:1)
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/may00/katz21
I think very few people knows this about a software that all of us have in that old 3,5" disks.
>The Associated Press
M I L W A U K E E, April 22 - A man who developed one of the world's most popular pieces of computer software has died at age 37. Phillip W. Katz died of complications from chronic alcoholism, according to the Milwaulkee medical examiner's records. Katz's file-compression software is used around the world. "In early days, compression was all done with software because there was no hardware to do this stuff," said computer science professor Leonard Levine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "So Katz put together a program called PKZip, the Phil Katz zip program." The compression software made communication between computers faster and less expensive. "His program was instrumental in inexpensive, dependable communication," Levine said. But, he added, "what I felt was most important about it is the fact that you can get it for free and not pay for it." Nearly all program files downloaded from the Internet have the suffix
Moment of Madness (Score:2)
As a software engineer, I live to create systems that people will use regularly and marvell. They'll be so good that you'll not think about the story behind them much, but ocasionally you will, just for long enough to think "Wow - the preson who did this really rocks". People like Muuss are pretty important. (what is with the bloody textbox navigaion in mozilla!?!?! Driving me *insane*)
It feels wired to real death notices on slashdot. (Last one I remember was Alec Guiness..) It doesn't matter how nicely put the death of someone you respect like these people is, it alwas feels chilling.
When I'm out of my exam... well.. I'm going to karioke. But when I'm home and my head's in order again I think I'm going to start a website devoted to these reports, and as tributes to those people.
Stay tuned!
Re:Slashdot should not report on deaths (Score:2)
Mike would indeed be laughing at this right now. He had a wry sense of humor, and appreciated the diversity of the inhabitants of the internet, from the geniuses to the morons, the proper to the tactless.
He had a heart of gold.
Re:Honored... (Score:2)
Re:No. (Score:1)
Re:The best way to celebrate the deceased... (Score:1)
Basically it is one huge party. Death's significance is as large as one of a wedding. So people should party. Life is celebrated, but shouldn't we celebrate his passing on to Afterlife?.
May he find all the answers to his unanswerable questions that he has asked on earth. Maybe he can now really come back and fiddle around with those electrons flowing through these pesky networks here. But he has no reason to... in the Great unfailing Internet in the sky, he probably won't even need 'ping'.
Muuss is dead! Long live Muuss!
Hello, Is There Anybody Out There? (Score:1)
Re:A song (With apologies to Eric Clapton) (Score:1)
He seems fine to me :-) (Score:1)
unbridled 2 % ping ftp.arl.mil
ftp.arl.army.mil is alive
Vanguard
Re:/. (Score:1)
The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
missed (Score:1)
Re:100% Packet Loss (Score:1)
Re:OLD! (Score:1)
Re:It is sad (Score:1)
Re:It is sad (Score:1)
In his own words (Score:5)
BRL CAD (Score:5)
Mike Muuss was also the author of BRL CAD, one of the most useful 3D modeling programs out there. It has one of the most intense CSG systems out there. I don't know what its licensing is, but I hope someone (with a strong graphics and geometry background) picks this up.
IIRC, he was working on real-time raytracing systems.
Route 95 (Score:1)
How sad to see one of the real creators of Internet die in an accident. How long will it take before cars will be obsoleted by ping, telnet, X11, VNC, whatever...
Bad Jokes (Score:1)
RIP: 100% Packet Loss
RIP: Request timed out
Finally,
* * * Mike Muuss
Funeral Details (Score:2)
Re:/. (Score:1)
Lets go get in some of dat derre smog ehe? How is it up der? You like breathin that shit
don't ye?
The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
You're right... (Score:3)
Think about the children!
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Re:Would this be appropriate? (Score:1)
For more meaningful discussion... (Score:1)
Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing
PING (Score:1)
Re:/. (Score:1)
Yes, my yankee friend, i agree. Lets have some tea. After you. No please after you. No, i insist
after you. Thank you very much. Your very welcome.
My friend of misery.
The willingness of humanity to follow without question is the fall of them.
Re:Slashdot should not report on deaths (Score:2)
Re:Huh? Where? (Score:1)
Cheers,
Tomas
===========
Re:It is sad (Score:2)
Cheers,
Damn... (Score:1)
But anyway, I found this amusing. I read
100% Packet Loss (Score:5, Insightful)
It is sad (Score:4, Insightful)
To see all the bad taste of some the post that are put up here...
Re:My condolences (Score:1)
--
Everyone should ping M$ for 30 seconds. (Score:1)
Ping... (Score:3)
100% packet loss.
Let his name live on as long as his program.
Here's to you, Mike (Score:1)
He published quite a bit of code that went into good use around the world, tho ping is undoubtably the most long-lived.
He'll be missed. Here's to you, Mike, wherever you are. May your roundtrips be low, your bandwidth high, and your storage farm at 100% uptime.
Bad ping (Score:1)
Re:Would this be appropriate? (Score:1)
Re:OLD! (Score:1)
---
A song (With apologies to Eric Clapton) (Score:4)
Could you ping my hostname,
if I routed to heaven?
Will it be the same,
if I routed to heaven?
I must hack long, and echo on,
cause I know that there are no
Pings in Heaven.
Would you know my addr,
if I routed to heaven?
Would you scan my ports,
if I routed to heaven?
I know I'll code my way, through night and day
Cause I know that there are no
Pings in Heaven.
ECHO can show you around,
ECHO can help you see,
ECHO can clog your pipe,
And have you screaming at script kiddies,
Script kiddies...
(flashing routing lights...)
K, it's early, and I have no coffee in me yet, I'll probably look back on this later and shoot myself.. :)
Although his body died (Score:5)
Re:A song (With apologies to Eric Clapton) (Score:2)
Re:thankful? (Slightly OT) (Score:1)
So what you are saying is that if Bill Gates were to die tomorrow, his death would be less meaningful to the tech. world than any of the others listed? I mean, his business practices are one thing, but you have to admit that he has had a rather significant impact on the I/T world in general.
He should be thanked. He contributed just as Mr. Muuss did, unfortunately, he has gotten bit in the ass for his more recent "contributions".
Re:OLD! (Score:1)
Ping (Score:1)
My Prayers are with him. (Score:1)
We send our prayers to Mike's family. God bless old friend.
Re:Ugh... (Score:2)
I think the world first needs to learn to respect the living.
Ping is a Damn Fine Hack (Score:1)
No. (Score:1)
Link.
I stole code from him actually.. (Score:1)
jupp, in_cksum from ping.c
I-95 Sucks... (Score:1)
Re:speaking of ping... (Score:1)
Pinging 127.0.0.1 will only tell you if the lo interface is up, and that isn't particularly useful in most situations.
I find it's best to ping the address of my DNS servers. The addresses are right there in
I knew him (Score:4)
He went the extra mile to help people all over, though it was no part of his job to do so. BRL didn't treat him as a sinecure and let him have his head. He put in a full day doing BRL stuff and then helped other folks around the country on his own time.
He was just an all-around great guy. One of the First has died.
More info (Score:3)
--
The only way to be sure... (Score:1)
PING mike.muuss (128.63.240.80): 56 data bytes
^C
--- mike.muuss ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
Death in the digital age (Score:1)
I've had the honor of caretaking a web site of a writer who died in a car accident last year. The family doesn't want the hassle of dealing with the technical issues or the thought of this information floating around forever. The reality is that you keep the site running a year or two until the domain registration expires and then you archive the files into cold storage. Your digital self isn't as permanent as you might want to think.
FYI, Mike's web site: http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ [arl.mil], for the moment.
Re: (Score:2)
Another tragic early end. (Score:1)
Somehow all that comes to mind is the phrase 'Only the good [theregister.co.uk] die, all the evil [microsoft.com] seems to live forever' seem appropriate (maybe its just my warped sense of humour)
The best way to celebrate the deceased... (Score:5)
I'm sure that if Muuss was reading /. right now, he'd be laughing at these jokes as much as any of us.
Let me tell you why humor exists... we have humor so that we can cope with the tragic events that populate our lives. It's a way of coping with loss... and a pretty damn good one too. Besides, I can barely think of any better ways to respect the dead than by calling attention to their accomplishments through humor.
Although, I must apologize for contributing to the excessive "destination unreachable" jokes. *sob* I didn't read everyone's posts before I cracked that one.
Sticks and stones (Score:2)
Do you think that his dignity depends on the sayings of Slashdot trolls?
__
Webpages of the dead (Score:2)
For a while, Afterdeath [afterdearh.org] was formed by volonteers that would maintain pages of dead people. But it seems that the project is also dead.
Then, given the low cost of diskspace and unused bandwidth and the high cost of webmaster attention, probably they join the number of the Ghostsites [disobey.com].
__
TTL Expired (Score:1)
Re:Brother Ok (Score:1)
R.I.P. (Score:1)
Re:thankful? (Score:1)
Re:thankful? (Score:1)
And as you said, he donates money, for whatever reason, that's a good thing...
Re:Memorial (Score:2)
Rest in peace.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
I say... (Score:1)
Re:Although his body died (Score:1)
Not so dim.. (OT) (Score:1)
It's not because of too much traffic, it's part of a decent security policy.
The rationale is pretty simple: Pings are used by attackers prior to portscans, so they can see if the hosts on a given network have machines connected to them. Blocking pings has one of two outcomes:
1) the attacker thinks that there are no machines on the network, so doesn't portscan anything, and goes to bug someone else. (This means I don't get bothered by them.)
2) If the attacker doesn't know which IP addresses have hosts and which don't, so they spend their time scanning every port on every IP address on the network, even though lots of IP addresses are unused. (This means I have much more time to do something about it.)
Either way, I win...
Muuss invented the default gateway and TTCP too. (Score:2)
Re:Death in the digital age (Score:3)
I had a similar experience earlier this year when Craphead (he posted a few times on Slashdot) died before the Linux Beer Hike. His site was eventually pulled by his ISP in Norway and I wish I had mirrored it first.
Your point about sites being pulled when the domain expires is a good one. The problem is that there is no 'standard' way of archiving them into cold storage where they can later be retrieved. At least with the older media (newspapers/mags etc) someone would usually keep a copy somwhere so it could be looked at by suceeding generations but not with a website.
This bitrot really needs addressing lest our decendants ask us what people posted and read in the exciting and dynamic days on the early Internet. Once the rm -rf has done its work nothing remains.
I am also a little saddened by this death, I never knew who was the creator of ping but use it everyday. I guess he, like Jon Postel, has left a little of himself on everyones computer and thereby improved the world a little for all those of us who are left behind.
Mike Muuss, thank you.
Best Ping Story (quoted from his site) (Score:2)
"The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:
ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder
He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure."
Haha.. Gotta love it.
Peace.
moment of silence (Score:2)
Pinging mike.muuss [102.11.20.11] with 64 bytes of data:
Request timedout
Request timedout
Request timedout
Re:Memorial for Mike (Score:2)
May your pings always be answered.
Haiku (Score:2)
From mike.muuss: Destination
Host Unreachable
Slashdot should not report on deaths (Score:3)
Since it is clear that Slashdot trolls cannot behave themselves, it is simply inappropriate for Slashdot to cover deaths. At the very least, ban AC's (like this I guess) from commenting on death notices. Let's not strip the poor guy of his dignity by letting asocial jerks run riot.
Re:Although his body died (Score:2)
May his IPV6 children live long and have fruitful productive lives.
May all your pings be answered.
More info - News article (Score:2)
You can find a more info (other than a newsgroup message :) at The Register [theregister.co.uk].
It is sad (Score:5)
Would this be appropriate? (Score:2)
A 21 Ping salute?
Cars and death and ping (Score:2)
-Moondog
the ping is dead (Score:2)
The king of ping is dead. (Score:2)
100% Packet Loss (Score:5)
But from what Ive read of his writing on his homepage (linked from above [army.mil]) and his letter to the InterNet Historical Society (linked from above [internet-history.org]) it seems Mike would have had a wry sense of humour.
Mike seems to have been a massive influence on great area's of computing (Internet, TCPIP, UNIX) and that should be celebrated and tech people should be Thankful for his efforts, and due honour paid now that he has passed.
But when a person dies, absolute reverence does not exclude comments of some brevity.
I am SURE, as I would have, foreseen the 100% Packet Loss jokes coming when I was dead - and I would have found the idea very amusing and quite complementary... Ill assume Mike Muss dosnt mind*...
*I know this sounds presumptuous but I think I you would see my point... Apologies to those who find it so nonetheless.
Re:Memorial (Score:5)
His work site will remain up because it has so much information that is off interest to the world. There is no need for it to ever go off line.
His personal server is still up and will remain up for as long as I can keep it running.
Re:OLD! (Score:2)
--
Re:Memorial (Score:2)
Looks like they are now filtering pings (forgive them, they probably had no choice). Also, the web page times out when I try to access it.
Slashdotted.
Re:thankful? (Slightly OT) (Score:3)
And the mafia should be thanked for their contributions to local communities. No thanks.
Re:BRL CAD (Score:3)
Mike has a working real time raytracier. The real time raytracer is handling >5000 solids at this time, rendering at ARL and then transmitting the results via ATM to other research labs.
The last major milestone for the BRL-CAD was raytracing a scene with over 3,000,000,000 solids. Yes, that is 3 billion.
The license agreement is not "Free" as in beer or "Free" as in "Freedom." You need to sign a simple license and fax it to ARL. They send back the license agreement with a password. Download the program and have fun.
Re:It is sad (Score:2)
kc.
Re:thankful? (Score:2)
I agree in principle, but it'd be a bit difficult...but I'll try....
[snip]
Thus sprach DrQu+xum, SID=218745.
Reported on The Register too (Score:3)
From their article:
The accident happened at 9.30pm (New York time) on route 95 as a result of a previous accident. Mike hit a car stuck in the middle of the road and was pushed into the path of an oncoming tractor.
R.I.P. (Score:2)
(Why does God get all the best coders?)
Re:The best way to celebrate the deceased... (Score:2)
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Re:OLD! (Score:2)
with winter coming and ice on road (well, in canada), we must be careful
--
Memorial (Score:5)
Please all have one minute of ping in his honor:
ping -c 60 ftp.arl.mil
That's so strange to look at http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ [arl.mil] and thinks this guy talking to you, and giving you a mailto: link is dead. It's like if there was a ghost speaking to you.
What happens to dead's homepage ? Do someone close them ? Or do they stand, like a simulacrum of eternity ?
Internet is something too young to be accustomed to death
It's a sad news.