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Monthly Archives: September 2007

Syzop Returns as Unreal3* Maintainer

On the 13th of May IRC-Junkie reported that Syzop had to retire as maintainer on the UnrealIRCd team because of RSI injury to his wrists.

“And I’m back! I was forced to go inactive 4 months ago due to a severe wrist issue. Now, after surgery and 3 months of recovery, I’m starting to get back on track again and I’ve resumed my position as Unreal3* maintainer in the UnrealIRCd team”, Syzop announced on the UnrealIRCd website.

“I’m currently at ~33% of my normal capacity,” Syzop said to IRC-Junkie, “but recovery is going steady and am rarely experiencing any pain now. Still, got to be very careful with how long I work, and stress levels.” He also has to do exercises to strengthen and stretch the muscles.

Syzop resumed his work as maintainer on the UnrealIRCd 3.* branch. “I’m personally not involved with Unreal4 at the moment, I’m only maintaining Unreal3, since I don’t want to stress my wrist too much.” Syzop sees the 3.* branch to be of importance for quite some time to come, so he focuses on this branch instead. “I also want to personally ensure that Unreal3 will be maintained long enough so nobody is rushed to Unreal4, hence also my statement on my own site saying I’ll support it in some shape or form until somewhere in 2009.”

“There are numerous changes to be done to Unreal4 to make it an Unreal product, some major.. many minor. And, of course, a lot of (stress)testing. I believe some good progress has been made during the summer vacation, but there’s still a lot left to do, and now the vacation is over progress is slower (as expected),” Syzop ends.

Thanks to DragonFlu who spotted this!

EFnet Admin Jafo Passes Away

EFnet.org reports the passing of Brad Allan Killebrew (also known as Jafo), admin on EFnet of the servers ircd.lagged.org and irc.nac.net.

“Mr. Killebrew was born in Temple to William Lee and Dianne Killebrew. He was a systems engineer for the Texas Network. He lived in Temple until the age of 10 and moved to Humble with his family where he graduated from Humble High School. He received a bachelors degree from the University of Houston. He was a member if the Institute for Electronic Engineer Computer Society, North American Network Operations Group and the American Radio Relay League. He was also an amateur radio operator”, the EFnet site reports.

Brad Allan Killebrew passed away last Thursday, September the 13th. A memorial service will be held Wednesday at Rosewood Funeral Home in Humble.

Thoughts can be left at this page on EFnet.org.

Stefano pointed IRC-Junkie out on this tragic news.

Happy BDay :-) !

It has been 25 years ago that professor Scott E. Fahlman, working at the Carnegie Mellon University, for the first time used the :-) emoticon (or smiley, depending on your religion on this) in an email.

He used the emoticon on a bulletin board in a discussion on the topic of online humor and the limits of it to express comments meant to be taken lightly. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) ,” he wrote. “Read it sideways.”

Variations on the original emoticon started to pop up pretty quickly, like the ;-) wink variation. The IRC ABC article on this page contains more exotic emoticon such as <:-) (Santa Claus) and  12x@>—>— (A dozen roses).

“I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started,” Fahlman said.

The emoticon gave the possibility for text to carry the emotion of a face, showing whether the text was meant seriously or perhaps a joke.