RIP: To remember those lost to us, whether close or at large

[AmLitHist]

Randy Meisner (one of the founding members of The Eagles), Sinead, and now Pee-Wee: those all hit hard, as an admirer of all three.  RIP all.

[fishbrains]

Pee Wee's Playhouse was hilarious. I was in my late twenties when I watched that on many Saturdays.

Yes. When I tell my kids "Your wish is granted! Long live Jambi!" when they ask for something, they give me the funniest blank stares.

[apl68]

This is the anniversary of the murder several years ago of a friend who was also a fellow staff member.  She was our janitor.  She worked hard to support her granddaughter whom she had custody of.  Two youths came into the house early one morning and shot her right in front of her granddaughter.  Then they shot the girl through the neck and left her for dead.  It's little short of a miracle that she was not killed outright and was able to make her way to help.

The crime was ostensibly a robbery, but hardly anything was taken.  There was hardly anything to take.  The assailants were black, and the victims were the only white household nearby.  Had the races been reversed, this would undoubtedly have been branded a hate crime, with national and international attention and every anniversary making the news.  Instead it was an obscure local crime that barely made the state paper.  The killers were quietly caught and tried--they were caught with very clear evidence of their guilt--and are now serving a long sentence. 

I remember the funeral.  The pastor challenged everybody present to remember that we all stand in need of God's forgiveness.  If we've accepted Jesus' offer of forgiveness, then we must in turn be prepared to forgive others--of anything--and pray that they will accept Jesus' forgiveness as well while they still can.  I do still pray for the two killers.  Maybe we can all be together with Jesus some day.  It's up to them to take advantage of the opportunity.  In the meantime, the killing failed to create an increase in local racial tensions.  The pastor didn't address the issue of race directly, but I believe his message had a lot to do with it. 

[hmaria1609]

Acclaimed Serbian novelist and translator David Albahari:
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/07/31/acclaimed-serbian-novelist-david-albahari-dies-at-75/
His novels were translated into 21 languages.

[Bbmaj7b5]

Mark Margolis, at 83. He played Hector Salamanca on "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul."

[ab_grp]

Mark Margolis, at 83. He played Hector Salamanca on "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul."

Such a great character among great characters (and actor among actors).  I hadn't realized he was from Philadelphia.

[jimbogumbo]

Sen. James Buckley, 100, who gave us FERPA: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4158901-former-sen-james-buckley-dies-at-100/

[secundem_artem]

Bobby Baun  A stalwart defenceman for the Maple Leafs in the 1960's.  Legendarily, he finished the 3rd period of one game playing on what he knew was a broken ankle.  Dude was tough as a boiled owl.

[Langue_doc]

Finally, in the NYT; other news outlets reported this at least a week ago.

John Warnock, Inventor of the PDF, Dies at 82
As a founder of Adobe Systems, he oversaw the development of software and systems that made modern personal computing possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/technology/john-warnock-dead.html

ETA: probably behind a paywall, so here's the article:

John Warnock, a founder of Adobe Systems whose innovations in computer graphics, including the ubiquitous PDF, made possible today's visually rich digital experiences, died on Aug. 19 at his home in Los Altos, Calif. He was 82.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, Adobe, which Dr. Warnock started in 1982 with Chuck Geschke, said in a statement.

Until Dr. Warnock and Adobe came along, desktop printing was an arduous, expensive and unsatisfying endeavor. Users relied on either a screechy dot-matrix printer, with its pixelated text, or a specialized typesetting machine, which could cost $10,000 and take up most of a room.

Dr. Warnock developed protocols that came loaded into desktop printers themselves, and that accurately rendered what a computer sent them. Adobe's first such protocol, PostScript, went into Apple's revolutionary LaserWriter, released in 1985, and within a few years it was the industry standard.

PostScript, licensed to hundreds of software and hardware companies, helped make Adobe rich. But the company was largely unknown to the public until 1993, when it released Acrobat, a program designed to render and read files in what it called a Portable Document Format, or PDF.

The PDF was the result of Dr. Warnock's abiding obsession since graduate school: finding a way to ensure that the graphics displayed on one computer — whether words or images — looked the exact same on another computer, or on a page from a printer, regardless of the manufacturer.

"It had been a holy grail in computer science to figure out how to communicate documents," he said in a 2019 interview with Oxford University.

Acrobat and the PDF were not immediately successful, even after Adobe made its Acrobat Reader free to download. The company's board wanted to retire them, but Dr. Warnock persisted.

"I think the crossover point is if I can go to General Motors and say, 'I can deliver your information more quickly and more cheaply than you can on paper,'" he told The New York Times in 1991. "You're talking about savings of tens of millions of dollars."

The PDF eventually became standard, as the ease of sharing crisp, accurate documents across computer systems made the long-envisioned paperless office a reality.

Though Adobe is best known for the PDF, it owes its dominance in the software industry to a whole suite of design programs championed by Dr. Warnock over the years, including InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.

Taken together, these programs helped make the modern personal computing experience what it is, turning what had been a soup of obscure commands and monochromatic images into an engaging aesthetic experience.

"Making the computer into a machine that we can use to produce visual and print culture, that wasn't foreordained," David Brock, the director of curatorial affairs at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., said in a phone interview. "That's where he was really instrumental."

John Edward Warnock was born on Oct. 6, 1940, in Holladay, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. His father, Clarence, was a lawyer; his mother, Dorothy (Van Dyke) Warnock, was a homemaker.

John was an admittedly average high school student who managed to flunk algebra in ninth grade. Nevertheless, he studied mathematics at the University of Utah, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1961 and a master's in the same subject in 1964.

He did not initially plan to go into technology. But a grueling summer job during graduate school spent recapping tires persuaded him to apply to IBM, which was recruiting mathematicians.

He returned to Utah to pursue a doctorate in mathematics, but after a few years he switched to electrical engineering, which at the time encompassed computer science. The university had recently received an enormous influx of money and resources from the Department of Defense to work on computer graphics, a field that had captured his interest.

He was especially captivated by the question of how to render a three-dimensional image in two dimensions. The result was the Warnock algorithm, a major step forward in computer graphics and the basis for some of his later work at Adobe.

He married Marva Mullins in 1965. She survives him, as do his daughter, Alyssa; his sons, Christopher and Jeffrey; and four grandchildren.

Dr. Warnock received his doctorate in 1969 and then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for a company founded by two of his mentors at Utah, David C. Evans and Ivan Sutherland. After they asked him to transfer to the company's Salt Lake City office he decided to stay in California instead and went to work for Xerox, whose Palo Alto Research Center was then pioneering the first personal computers.

There he met Dr. Geschke, and the two became fast friends. Dr. Warnock spent years working on how to get printers to render an image from a computer screen, a seemingly easy issue that had befuddled computer scientists for years. (Dr. Geschke died in 2021).

But when he presented his solution, InterPress, to his bosses, they were not interested in releasing it to the public. He and Dr. Geschke, who had worked on the project, were crestfallen.

"I went into his office, and I said, 'We can live in the world's greatest sandbox for the rest of our life, or we can do something about it,'" Dr. Warnock said in a 2018 interview with the Computer History Museum.

They both quit, and in late 1982 they founded Adobe Systems, named for a creek near Dr. Warnock's home. In 2023 it had a market capitalization of $235 billion, making it one of the largest information-technology companies in the world.

In 2009, President Barack Obama presented the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to both Dr. Warnock and Dr. Geschke.

Dr. Warnock and Dr. Geschke, who ran the company as equals, were rare exceptions among the outsize egos and eccentric zillionaires of Silicon Valley: avuncular and academic, they built an aggressively competitive company while consistently ranking high on lists of the best places to work.

Despite its size, Adobe was often cast as the David versus much larger Goliaths, most often Microsoft — which, unlike Apple, repeatedly rejected Dr. Warnock's entreaties to collaborate and instead tried to beat Adobe with its own protocols and programs. None of them worked.

Dr. Warnock, who had 20 patents to his name, stepped down as chief executive in 2001 but remained on Adobe's board of directors.

"Being a C.E.O. of a company that is over $1 billion is not all it is cracked up to be," he said in an interview with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. "The thing I really enjoy is the invention process. I enjoy figuring out how to do things other people don't know how to do."

Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of "American Rye: A Guide to the Nation's Original Spirit." More about Clay Risen

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 25, 2023, Section B, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline:

[Langue_doc]

RIP, our colleague who was killed in a UNC lab.

U.N.C. Faculty Member Is Fatally Shot in Lab
The school's Chapel Hill campus had ordered students and faculty to stay inside Monday afternoon after warning of an "armed, dangerous person." A suspect was later arrested.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/us/university-north-carolina-shooting.html?searchResultPosition=1

[AmLitHist]

Jimmy Buffett, aged 76.

[waterboy]

He finally "cruised on back home"

[hmaria1609]

Besides performing in the metro DC area, Jimmy Buffet enjoyed the local seafood in Annapolis:
https://wtop.com/entertainment/2023/09/jimmy-buffett-remembered-by-dc-area-parrotheads/
Posted on WTOP online 8/2/23

He also had a bit role in "Jurassic World" (2015):
https://www.thewrap.com/jimmy-buffett-margaritaville-jurassic-world-cameo/

[secundem_artem]

Another musical icon of my youth:  Gary Wright.  Formerly with Spooky Tooth he had a massive solo hit in the late 70's with his Dream Weaver album. All keyboards and synths.  No guitars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/arts/music/gary-wright-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries

[kaysixteen]

Music was much much better in the 70s.