This feed contains the 10 most recent pages in the "death" category.

Yesterday evening, I god the news that my uncle Jacques (in France) had died the night before. I was at a loss... I had seen him just a few weeks ago, on a trip to see family in France. We were at a dinner at my cousin's, and Jacques, who had previously said he didn't want to join, decided to show up after all, explicitely to see me (we hadn't seen each other for 20-30 years, I believe). It's almost as if he knew...

I kind of fell apart yesterday evening, already being a bit emotional, this just added to it. Fortunately, I had a friend that could come over, keep me company and hold me when I needed it.

Rest in peace, oncle Jacques, and thank you for wanting to meet one last time.

Posted Nov 9, 2014, 9:29:42 PM +0100 | Tags: death

The news today, provided by The Register, is that HP has decided to put an end to VMS.

Somehow, the only thing happening in me is a sigh and a silent final goodbye. I think I've seen this coming for years, even though not very consciously... it's been ages since I wrote a single line of DCL, it's a couple of years since I last logged in on a VMS machine... I think I personally let VMS die a long time ago, a slow death.

VMS is worth remembering, though. In many ways, it's a fantastic operating system. Not for the command line, but for the internal functionality. In my mind, nothing beats the system services provided, nothing beats the $QIO and events functionality, it was possible to write a completely event driven program with just a few lines of code.

My life with VMS started 1989/1990, when I landed a part time job as a system manager. Shortly before, I had fallen in love with GNU emacs, and was amazed that there was a pretty damn good port of version 18.55 for VMS. That was a somewhat aged version, though, and I knew that I wanted to be able to use version 18.59 that was the current version at the time. So I started working on porting it and sharing the results, and enhancing things that I wanted to work better than before.
In a few years, I had learned OpenVMS (Digital renamed the operating system to indicate that it got POSIX certified), grew into a good system admin as well as programmer, dived into the free software/opensource community and gained some fame for working on and maintaining the port of emacs for VMS.
A few years later, I started enhancing the port of SSLeay for VMS, later to become the port of OpenSSL. This lead to a job, further enhancements of OpenSSL and a membership in the OpenSSL development team, and somewhere along the way, I became fairly good at writing code that would build and run smootly on multiple operating system families (OpenVMS and Unix, first of all).

In the end, I can't thank VMS enough. It provided me with an entrance to so many things that shaped me for some 20+ years, and has been fun to play with and work with for many of those years.

Today, it's like finally parting from a friend that I've seen slowly fade away over a few years.

Goodbye, friend...

Posted Jun 11, 2013, 10:26:49 AM +0200 | Tags: death

... a little more than a month ago. He passed away quickly, it seems, from a heart attack, only 42 years old.

I remember him as kind, warm and true to his word... and ever present, at least at Stacken which was our common base. mho was how we usually reffered to him.

I was at the funeral last thursday, together we 20ish other Stacken members, as well as the following memorial. Many memories were shared, and there was some beautiful songs sung, lead by mho's father (who looks so very much like his son!). Emotions were high at times.

At the end of the memorial, we all got to choose one item from a collection of things (books and music) that mho cherished. It felt a bit unusual, but nice... it's like those objects reinforced the memories. I picket a book by Heinlein...

A number of us went on in the evening, for dinner and beer. We raised one for mho.

Rest well wherever you are, my friend. You will be remembered.

Posted Nov 6, 2011, 12:24:37 AM +0100 | Tags: death

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