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
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Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
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Received on Sun Jan 19 2014 - 12:07:38 IST