Hi all, below is a post I've made to the Freecell Solver Discussiong mailing list having learned about the recent death of Adrian Ettlinger, a software developer whom I collaborated with in my work on free and open source software (FOSS), and who also developed and released some FOSS of his own. Adrian was a dear Internet friend, and I feel like I need to share this with you.
I mention it in the post, but you can learn more about Adrian from these resources: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Ettlinger * http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/interviews/adrian-ettlinger.html I also wrote a (true) story about my interaction with Adrian as a submission for an Israeli story contest on one of the Free Software Days, which was published back in 2004 : http://whatsup.org.il/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3480&mode=nested&order=0&thold=0 It's in Hebrew, but I'd like to translate it to English some time. Regards, Shlomi Fish Begin forwarded message: Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 22:07:36 +0200 From: Shlomi Fish <shlo...@shlomifish.org> To: Freecell Solving Discussions <fc-solve-disc...@yahoogroups.com> Subject: In Memoriam: Adrian Ettlinger (1925 - 2013) Dear everybody, Today I learned (by a web search that gave this English Wikipedia page as the first result - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Ettlinger ) that Adrian Ettlinger, whom some of you may know as a chief developer of FreeCell Pro and its included Woods-Callan-Ettlinger solver, and a general FreeCell Enthusiast, had passed away in October 2013: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Ettlinger Adrian’s contributions to Freecell research were far from being his only claim to fame, and he has also made some substantial contributions to non-linear video editing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-linear_video_editing ) during his work as an Electrical Engineer for the CBS corporation, developed a shareware program called AniMap, which is instrumental to some researchers of geneology, had been married, and also fathered several children, and has several living grandchildren. The Wikipedia page about him has some information about his contributions to television and video editing. Most of his FreeCell-related work was done after his retirement. I was fortunate to conduct this interview with Adrian in 2003 : http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/interviews/adrian-ettlinger.html We also corresponded extensively in E-mail, and I still have copies of most of his messages, and possibly may be able to share at least some of them (but I'll have to see about the various ethical, legal and moral aspects of it.). After the process of integrating Freecell Solver with FreeCell Pro was done, we discussed other fields including religion, philosophy, economics, politics, our friends and families, employment, humour, computers. and games. Adrian was almost always kind in his E-mails, and was incredibly patient with the process of getting Freecell Solver to cooperate with FreeCell Pro, until we were able to achieve that. My last message from Adrian is dated 7 December 2012, about 10 and a half months before his death, and he was still perfectly communicative. There were several long gaps between our E-mail communications, when he didn't respond to my last message for a long time, so I didn't quite suspect that he passed away. I now feel sad and kinda want to cry but am still unable to. Anyway, if possible, you can try helping with editing the wikipedia page about him[Wikip-typo]. and I wonder if I can get some leads (E-mails/etc.) for his surviving family members to send them my condolences, and share some stories about him. I'm sorry that I didn't have a chance to meet Adrian face to face (we only corresponded via E-mail, and a little via Facebook and IRC). Sincerely yours, Shlomi Fish [Wikip-typo] - I already fixed a typo in the reference to the Interview I conducted with Adrian (which I’m honoured to be used as a reference in the wikipedia) of my name where it was misspelled as "Schlomi" instead of "Shlomi". ( Lots of people have misspelled it this way recently for some reason. ) For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Ettlinger&diff=591448634&oldid=590087343 -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
_______________________________________________ Discussions mailing list Discussions@hamakor.org.il http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discussions
