I'm too old and cynical for hero worship of the teenage kind so don't get the wrong idea. Nonetheless some of the people named below have made significant contributions to the environment in which I live and work, the tools I use (and am using to type this) and to tools that I have created or modified my self.
In no particular order, mostly most recent first, here are my heroes and helpers:
- Eric S. Raymond
- for How To Ask Questions The Smart Way among other things.
- Sven Türpe
- for Yasig. A brilliant piece of AWK scripting that makes a keyword index of a static website. Not only does it work (only had to make a few minor adjustments for my setup) but it illustrates some good AWK idioms. The AWK style is much better than my automatic menu scripts, much more AWK-ish where mine is really just generic procedural code that happens to use AWk's pattern matching capabilities.
- John Walker
- Founder of Autodesk, for being himself. For making some very interesting anarchist documents available. Not sure that I like the conjunction of anarchy and libertarianism; perhaps it doesn't really imply that the two are necessarily equivalent but it seems that way. Not entirely sure that the EU is the Evil Empire either (could be persuaded on that point). Never mind that, too many of us view politics as alien to technology when in fact technology and politics go hand in hand down the ages; John Walker puts all these things in one place so you can see some connections.
- Gnuplot Team
- for gnuplot; a really neat plotting tool for both 2d and 3d charts.
- Ricardo Sasson Saat
- For the VBGnuPlot wrapper for gnuplot which inspired me to create another wrapper to go around his wrapper.
- Mike Gleason
- for NcFTP, this world's best FTP client. NcFTPPut is used to upload this web site; so much easier than GUI clients.
- Fabio Guerrazzi
- Great site with easily understood free Visual Basic source code for various things to do with user interfaces especially graphics. I took his property dialog component and reworked it to do things my way, saved me a lot of time as I didn't have to design it myself just reimplement to support my extra features.
- Dave Love
- at Daresbury Laboratory for help with visual-basic-mode.el.
- John Wiegley
- Without John Wiegley this Wiki and many others that I use every day in both work and play would not exist.
- Geoff Voelker
- for the NT Emacs distribution; need I say more?
- William Perry
- for Emacs-W3 one of the best web browsers you can find. William Perry is now trying to get some help to rework W3 as components.
- Richard Stallman
- for Emacs itself and the politics of free software.
- Linus Torvalds
- for Linux. Good to see that there are people even worse at web sites than me.
- Christian Lemburg
- a considerate and helpful user of XEmacs who found a bug, fixed it, reported it and supplied the patch.
- Simon Marshall
- provided a fix to make VBP-mode.el work in emacs-19.29.
- Robert Marshall
- suggested some fixes but I can't remember what they were now!
- stop1984
German site about
surveillance and the erosion of privacy and liberty.- xenu
- A website link checker but also a campaign against Scientology.
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