RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

[Posted July 26, 2012 by corbet]

The Register has an article on the life and death of Andre Hedrick, the former kernel IDE maintainer who passed away on July 13. "Today, millions of people use digital restriction management systems that lock down books, songs and music - the Amazon Kindle, the BBC iPlayer and Spotify are examples - but consumers enter into the private commercial agreement knowingly. It isn't set by default in the factory, as it might have been. The PC remains open rather than becoming an appliance. Andre was never comfortable taking the credit he really deserved for this achievement." See also this weblog page where memories are being collected.

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Posted Jul 26, 2012 14:31 UTC (Thu) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link]

Hat off to an unsung hero.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 26, 2012 15:08 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

Ƿe ſee many deaþs in ðe free ſoftƿare community, moſt of ðem relatively youŋ people. Granted, ƿhen ſomeone in Microſoft or Oracle dies it is not neƿs, as ðey hide ðeir engineers & people do not care for ſomeone ƿho ƿorks only for his oƿn, not ðe community’s, benefit. Yet one ſtill gets ðe impreßion ðere are many ſuicides. Perhaps it is to be expected from a community ƿiþ a hiȝ incidence of Aſperger ſyndrome, but perhaps our culture is ſick? I do not intend to pry into a family’s grief, but it makes one ƿonder ƿhat would make a Χian faðer of four youŋ children ſuicidal… or ſuch an youŋ perſon as ðe Diaſpora cofounder a feƿ monþs ago.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 26, 2012 16:12 UTC (Thu) by pharm (guest, #22305) [Link]

Are you doing that just to annoy everyone else?

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 26, 2012 16:19 UTC (Thu) by cuboci (subscriber, #9641) [Link]

Funny thing is, although it's annoying you can read it almost without effort after a few words.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 26, 2012 17:09 UTC (Thu) by thumperward (guest, #34368) [Link]

That was probably one of the number of points that the author was attempting to make, along with apparently wishing to make clear that he doesn't think Oracle and Microsoft employees are people. But then LWN is the new Slashdot, so it will attract trolls looking for attention by posting inflammatory comments on an obituary.

Rest in peace, Andre Hendrick.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 27, 2012 7:12 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

I can't, even with effort. I suppose I would need to research some translation for those characters. I see the long s here, but the other ones are just foreign to me.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 27, 2012 9:17 UTC (Fri) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]

ð Is Eth ( actually , a version of d, edd in old scandic languages )
ƿ is Wynn, version of W
ſ is a long S, as you mentioned
ȝ is Yogh, Mix between y and j in sound.

He's not typing it naturally, it's just a regexp to annoy people.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 27, 2012 10:39 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

You omitted one:

ŋ is Eng, which is pronounced like ng

I assumed it was done to raise awareness of unicode amongst people who are normally content with latin1, not just to be annoying.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 27, 2012 21:35 UTC (Fri) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

Yes, I love Unicode & paleotypography.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 27, 2012 21:34 UTC (Fri) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

I am typiŋ naturally. Ðe beauty of X11’s xkb, noƿ in ðe conſole too.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 27, 2012 22:01 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

However, what you are typing is not English, and you are communicating on an English language site.

posting things in a different language than everything else on a site is annoying and rude.

On a more practical matter, it distracts people from what you are trying to say by making it hard for them to read it.

IT'S WORSE THAN IF YOU WERE TYPING IN ALL CAPS ;-), and we all know how annoying posters who do that can be.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 28, 2012 10:47 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I'll agree, it's annoying, but I must disagree with your claim that

However, what you are typing is not English

It is English. It is English as it might have been printed had the people who first took up Gutenberg's new device possessed typefaces that contained all the characters then used in the written language. They didn't, so we dropped some of them. (At least we dropped thorn and yogh, though ash, eth and wynn were dropping out of use anyway. A shame, they're lovely characters. All fonts should have them, even if nobody ever uses them for anything.)

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 28, 2012 12:09 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Well, if he insists on using the 13th century English alphabet, he should by rights also be using 13th century English grammar and vocabulary.

What we're seeing here is like having the King James Bible printed in Comic Sans.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 27, 2012 22:03 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

Now I'm interested. How is it done? How do you distinguish thorn from eth?

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Sep 18, 2012 14:00 UTC (Tue) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

I have in my Debian Wheezy /etc/default/keyboard file:

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us,gr,br,apl,il,ru"
XKBVARIANT="intl,polytonic,,,,"
XKBOPTIONS="altwin:left_meta_win,compose:rwin,grp:shifts_toggle,nbsp:level3n"

Actually apl has recently broken, ſo I am lookiŋ for hoƿ to fix it.

XKBLAYOUT="us… combined ƿiþ XKBVARIANT="intl… makes my keyboard an ‘International’ one. Ðat gives me the riȝt Alt key as AltGr (alternate graphic character), ſo AltGr‐d is ð, AltGR‐D is Ð, AltGr‐t is þ, AltGr‐s is ß & ſo on.

Oðer characters, ſuch as ðe loŋ ſ or ðe ŋ, muſt be compoſed. XKBOPTIONS="[…]compose:rwin… enables me to preß ðe riȝt logo key folloƿed by a combination. So Compoſe‐fs is ſ, Compoſe‐ng is ŋ, Compoſe‐NG is Ŋ, Compoſe‐--- is — & ſo on. Some combinations I uſe are already defined, ƿhile for oðers ſuch as Compoſe‐ww beiŋ ƿ, Compoſe‐WW beiŋ Ƿ or Compoſe‐--, beiŋ ‐ I muſt inſert at /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose a few lines, ſuch as:

<Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <comma> : "‐" U2010 # HYPHEN
<Multi_key> <w> <w> : "ƿ" U01BF # LATIN LETTER WYNN
<Multi_key> <W> <W> : "Ƿ" U017F # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER WYNN
<Multi_key> <G> <G> : "Ȝ" U021C # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER YOGH
<Multi_key> <g> <g> : "ȝ" U021D # LATIN LETTER YOGH

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Sep 18, 2012 15:51 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

~/.XCompose should be just enough.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 28, 2012 4:52 UTC (Sat) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

"Hat off to an unsung hero."

Actually, Andre was a well sung hero to a significant number of people, including me. I feel entirely confident in stating that credit goes first and foremost to Andre for the high standards of reliability and performance of ATA disk support in Linux.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 26, 2012 15:55 UTC (Thu) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link]

Andre was a real personality. Sometimes a bit hot-headed, sometimes a bit paranoid. But always very sharp and smart. Not everyone had an easy time working with him because of his style, but I always enjoyed talking to him and working some technical things out... or just chat with him about this or that... like how one uses dental floss to fix a gun that got neutered into a 'semi' in the factory.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 26, 2012 18:52 UTC (Thu) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

Andre was a good egg who always stuck to his guns and always insisted on doing the right thing, with considerable success. His famously short fuse made him vulnerable to troll attacks, and those responsible should reflect on that and perhaps feel shame. Remember the year of pain that followed when Andre's stewardship of IDE suddenly ended? My lasting memory of Andre will always be, sitting around his comfortable home in the rolling hills above San Francisco, waxing poetic about all that is right and wrong with life, the universe and the ATA standard.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 26, 2012 19:11 UTC (Thu) by spender (subscriber, #23067) [Link]

Please consider donating toward the family's funeral costs and for his four young children. The information is at the memorial blog linked to in the article.

I had emailed back and forth with Andre in August of last year. He surprised me with the enthusiasm he had for his project and seemed determined to see it through. His emails to me were all very kind; I really regret not being of more help to him.

-Brad

Are we doing all that we can?

Posted Jul 27, 2012 0:46 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

As a group, the set of Open Source / Free Software developers are not consistently civil to each other, and are subject to flamers from the outside as well. We lose all too many to suicide, and there are a few who have gone so insane as to be dangerous to others.

I'm not saying that the mortality of our membership is our fault as a community. Smart people have their own vulnerabilities. There is enough that is depressing about the world around us, growing old and losing health, etc.

But is there more that we can be doing to support our own people? I don't yet have an answer.

Are we doing all that we can?

Posted Jul 27, 2012 0:58 UTC (Fri) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

Thanks Bruce. Exactly what I meant to say, but you said it better.

Are we doing all that we can?

Posted Jul 27, 2012 1:43 UTC (Fri) by shanen (guest, #85975) [Link]

You and OSS need better funding models. I'm not saying that money can solve every problem, but lack of money is such a problem that it can drive someone to suicide, and a good supply of money from an effective funding model can sustain even such an incompetent company as Microsoft in good financial health. My suggestion would be based on reverse auction charity shares.

No, I don't know any of the details in this case, but even if money wasn't part of his personal problems, it's become a concern for his family now. I would probably buy shares in a project to help them.

Are we doing all that we can?

Posted Jul 27, 2012 1:51 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Please drop an email to bruce at perens dot com, I'd like to leave this page for its intended purpose and discuss this elsewhere. Anyone else interested in the concept, drop an email as well.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 27, 2012 1:27 UTC (Fri) by mgalgoci (guest, #24168) [Link]

Rest well friend.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Jul 27, 2012 21:26 UTC (Fri) by jgarzik (guest, #8364) [Link]

Posted a memorial email to Andre on the linux-ide list:
http://marc.info/?l=linux-ide&m=134341207902410&w=2

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Aug 3, 2012 5:01 UTC (Fri) by jtc (subscriber, #6246) [Link]

Anyone know why wikipedia appears to not know of Andre Hedrick? Very strange.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Aug 3, 2012 18:38 UTC (Fri) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link]

Not strange at all. Very few people have a Wikipedia page devoted to them; even well-known celebrities like our own grumpy editor are missing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Corbet

Their guidelines for who is considered notable enough for an entry are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_%28peop...

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Aug 3, 2012 21:06 UTC (Fri) by khc (guest, #45209) [Link]

because he's there as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Corbet

Andre Hedrick: not in Wikipedia

Posted Aug 5, 2012 19:59 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Their guidelines for who is considered notable enough for an entry are here: ...

In relevant part, to be worthy of an article, Andre not only has to be important and well known, but the subject of multiple existing works, each of which is written by someone who didn't know of him personally but read about him in other works.

I suspect that guideline is widely ignored, like the ban on original research, to Wikipedia's benefit, but it does make it that much less likely for Andre to have an article.

Andre Hedrick: not in Wikipedia

Posted Aug 6, 2012 0:49 UTC (Mon) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

> I suspect that guideline is widely ignored

No guideline is "widely ignored". Sure, Wikipedia doesn't have "police" patrolling all changes and making sure that guidelines are uniformly enforced, but when someone raises an issue, the policies and guidelines certainly count.

Andre Hedrick: not in Wikipedia

Posted Aug 6, 2012 3:12 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

when someone raises an issue, the policies and guidelines certainly count.

That is consistent with policies and guidelines being widely ignored. If people frequently create articles that violate a guideline, and no one raises an issue, that is a guideline that is widely ignored.

I see that happen a lot.

Andre Hedrick: not in Wikipedia

Posted Aug 6, 2012 8:58 UTC (Mon) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

Sorry about taking this comment thread off topic but...

> I see that happen a lot.

I see the other side a lot, too.

I think you have a selection bias -- by definition, you can only see the articles that *weren't* deleted. And the original research that *wasn't* contested. The fact that some of it is still out there doesn't mean that the guidelines are "widely ignored".

In reality, the deletion processes are full of new articles that get deleted due to lack of notability. I don't have the stats, but I'd bet more than half of new articles get properly reviewed. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_dele... . Yes, that's 60-100 articles per day, every day.

RIP Andre Hedrick (Register)

Posted Dec 27, 2012 12:24 UTC (Thu) by gcooper (guest, #73533) [Link]

I understand that it's very posthumous now, but I felt it necessary to say.

Andre was my mentor and friend. Andre took the time and the patience to invest in me when I first came to California to work for Cisco (he made the final call on hiring me). Over the course of the next year and a half we became friends working on the Nova (an IOS on Linux) project at Cisco and after I left the Nova group at Cisco we periodically kept in touch over the phone, saw him in person at work when I dropped by the Milpitas office, etc.

There were many times that he sat down and talked me through various technical and non-technical discussions. We usually hung out and coded while watching Bleach (that was our usual Tuesday thing when he'd come down from his house after working remote for the rest of the week), and there was more than one occassion where we worked into the night solving problems (I am a night owl and Andre was almost always awake working on something big for the group). He was the one guy I knew who could deliver to completion without breaking too much of a sweat, could think through problems 100%, would test his stuff completely, would give me sound technical advice, and was never short of awesome, snarky programming comments.

Andre was never short of amusing stories with lessons embued in them, and he was always there with a smile when needed (and frequently invoked groans/smiles from those around him :)..).

Andre's passion for technical correctness and design was unparalleled. His abrasive, yet caring attitude for his coworkers and lightheardness is something that I haven't come across in my professional career thus far, and something that I will probably not find again.

Andre: thank you for being my mentor, for being a part of my life and I will miss you friend. Hopefully you're out there pissing off the minority doing the right thing for everyone else like you did so often passionately in the past when you were alive; I will do my best to honor your memory.