Sad to see this post on Google Plus tonight:

Rob Pike  -  10:02 PM  -  Public

I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at home this weekend.
I have no more information. I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach
of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately. He was a quiet and mostly
private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has
lost a truly great mind.

For anyone unsure of who this great man was, you really should check out his wikipedia entry but the main part is:

Ritchie is best known as the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, and as co-author of the definitive book on C, The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie). Ritchie's invention of C and his role in the development of Unix alongside Ken Thompson have placed him as an important pioneer of modern computing. The C language is still widely used today in application and operating system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. Unix has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now well-established precepts of computing.

A serious loss for any programmer or unix geek and anyone else that knows where many modern things like linux, bsd, osx, etc started

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    printf("Rest In Peace Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie\n");
    printf("Thank You for so much\n");
    return 0;
}

Also relevant: this post was typed on an Archlinux laptop and hosted on a Debian vps. Thanks again dmr!

Man, what a terrible week this has turned out to be. At the beginning of the week I had a job interview on a job I believe I am qualified for and had experience doing as I had done other jobs of nearly the same thing though on a different scale (more computers to monitor but also I wouldn't have been the ONLY one doing the job like I had been in previous companies).

Late Wednesday I heard rumblings that the two positions had been filled and I hadn't heard anything, leading to a downer of a night while I waited for official confirmation. Next day I email the company and find out that in fact the positions had been filled the night before. Ok, I'm quite disappointed as it would have been more what I want to do for work, more money and steady hours.

So that left me in a slump on Thursday. On friday though, I woke up early, decided to walk to work. Get all ready, plug the headphones into my tablet and start walking.

Or, I tried to. Going down 5 steps seemed to be more than I could handle. In my defense the steps are cement and have some chunks taken out of them. Sadly, I lost my footing on one of them and managed to twist my ankle into a horrible looking (and feeling) angle, putting an end to my planned day.

Nearly seven hours later, I find out the end result (Canadian medical is free but painfully slow, in my case, literally painfully slow): I managed to break one bone in my ankle, a minor break in the other one and a few tense minutes as a specialist at another hospital decided if I needed immediate surgery or not. Currently I don't need it, but for the next week I have no cast while they see how it tries to fix itself and to reduce the swelling. After that week, i'll either end up in surgery if it's bad or a cast otherwise. Then a couple weeks after I have to go visit the specialist and see how it's going.

People seem to be fond of saying things come in three, I'm really hoping there's no more bad news coming. I'm not sure I'll survive that one.

Over on the Citrix Blog there is a short guide on downloading XenDesktop 5 Express with 1 year license, XenServer 5.6, some documentation and other useful software & guides. It's a nice way to make a test lab or just to brush up or add to your skills. I may go through the setup simply to add to mine :)

As a bonus, I found a link to Craig Ellrod's setup on the site as well which looks interesting.

As I'm Canadian and a large bandwidth user, I support the OpenMedia's attempt to bring CRTC into line and stop being in the big ISPs pockets to make them richer at the expense of Canadians & Canadian companies as well as competition (which CRTC is supposed to encourage, not destroy) like Netflix

More information can be found at OpenMedia

According to Microsoft on February 22nd Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008r2 will be released on Windows Update as well as the Microsoft Download Center. Those of you with access to MSDN or TechNet as well as Volume License Key (VLK) customers will get access to it early, on February 16th. Which of course will be followed almost immediately with dozens of torrents on the 16th about 5 minutes after.

The service pack includes, two new desktop virtualization features (RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory) as well as collecting all of the updates and fixes for the operating systems in one update rather than dozens of others.

I've been running a beta version of it for a little while now without any problems, so this should be a nice update for one of my more liked Microsoft Operating Systems. If it wasn't, Linux would have totally taken over my systems by now :)