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Lobby4Linux Founder Battles Illness
Ken Starks, the man many of LXer's readers know as "helios", has long been using his pen - well, would you believe his keyboard? - to fight the battle for freedom, whether it is software freedom, freedom to play the music you pay for, or even just the freedom to enjoy some degree of privacy. And he's a real fighter. The blog post I think of as most symbolic of helios' battle for freedom was of the 86-year-old Great Grandmother Hoisting the Jolly Roger. Helios raised money to go to Washington, D.C. a while back. While there, he slept in his vehicle and ate lunch at a homeless shelter so he would have enough money to get back to Texas. What we did not know until now is that, upon returning to Texas, helios was immediately hospitalized. He has been in and out of the hospital ever since. The trip, it turns out, was a serious health risk. Some of us knew he faced health problems; we did not know the extent of those problems. The fact is, cancer is killing him. Helios, according to his wife, Debbie, "is horribly ill." It is not clear whether helios realized his lung was partially collapsed when he left his family behind for Washington. If so, he didn't tell anyone. He simply had to fulfill his mission. He has kept quiet about his health problems, dropping only a few hints on the LXer forums and in e-mails. Speculation by one or two people that he may have mis-used the funds he raised for his trip to Washington is likely due to his inability to communicate effectively. He has not been able to use a computer at all while in the hospital, due to his condition. His wife e-mailed a few people Friday afternoon, mainly in response to harshly critical e-mails. What did helios accomplish in Washington? Probably not much. Had he dined with Senator Kennedy or some other big shot law-maker, we surely would have been informed by now. But he went up there and attempted to make his voice heard. He sought to speak with anyone who would so much as give him the time of day. And even if he didn't win over a single law-maker in Washington, he spoke up for all of us to whatever audience he may have obtained. According to the doctors, Forrester, and the Yankee Group, helios was supposed to be dead last November, along with the OpenDocument Format. What they did not factor into their analysis was that helios found a purpose, something he could focus on - freedom. Not only did he keep up his blog and raise money to go to Washington, he gave a presentation to some 400 Realtors about how they could save money and improve their businesses with GNU/Linux. That's an activist's activist - a person who actually does something. The Lobby4Linux site will probably be inactive for a while, unless someone else takes up the activist banner. And that brings us to a question. Just how far are you willing to go to stand up for freedom? Is anyone else willing to take up the banner? Richard Stallman and others have devoted many years of their lives to freeing people technologically and culturally. Helios risked his life going to Washington. Why? Freedom is just that important. Helios was in the process of being brought home from the hospital at the time this article was written Friday evening. He will be unable to use his computer for some time. The editorial team of LXer wishes helios and his family all the very best, and hopes that the battle will turn in his favor. Thanks for all your efforts, and keep on fighting! - dcparris |
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Comments (34)
Heartbreaker.
Many of Helios's writings were among the most inspiring things I've read on the net, motivating to action. He didn't loose the battle for freedom, he inspires others to take on it. He mustn't loose the battle for his life.
Get better helios!
Daniel
Wish you all the best Ken!
I have not had the pleasure of meeting Ken face to face but it does not matter.
To read his articles is to know him. I pray for you to get better Ken.
It's terrible news to find out about your health problems, but I'd like to take a moment to focus on what you did in washington. From the first time I argued with you in the pclinuxOS forums, it was apparent that you are passionate about everything you believe in. Yet you present your passion with a level head and always explain your side well. These qualities are common, but rarely does a man possess both. I cannot think of a better man to represent the open source cause in Washington.
You have succeeded where so many have failed at converting schools and other institutions, to get them started on the open source road. You present this in your blog, and in the forums as if this was a simple matter, yet we know how hard you must have fought for every little victory. It's a hard world out there for a lone soldier with nothing but a burnt CD in his hands and a dream. You are an inspiration, not only to those who believe in open source software, but those that believe in anything.
-> Trevor
like Sal, I'm not granting you permission to leave. Regardless, I suspect you'll do whatever 'you' think is right... It seems to be a pattern :)
http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/23174/
My prayers are with you.
Live like you were dying
We know about Tug and Tim. We can see the things they created, the dollars raised, the albums sold. But the anonymous millions...that's where the real work gets done, one by one and one on one.
In our star-obsessed world, we tend to overlook the incredible impact each and every one of us has on the lives of those around us.
My mother is convinced that I got my kid brother to college by taking him to a Texas Rangers baseball game. His father got tickets all the time, but never took him. I did. They were playing the Yankees and we got to see Reggie Jackson stick a fork in the Rangers. Bought him some goofy game souvenir. Had a great time.
Big deal.
Except that Michael decided to go out for his baseball team. Wasn't real good, but enjoyed being on the team. When Texas passed it's "No pass, no play" law, Michael hit the books to avoid being kicked off the team. He brought his grades up enough to stay on the team -- and to be accepted into college.
Who knew? Ken - helios -
I know that you've touched friends and family in ways you can't know or even imagine. And you touch them still.
I know that the internet has given you friends you've never even met, yet you've touched us, too. And touch us still.
History teaches that humanity is a frail condition. Our bodies let us down. Our passions whither. Our courage fails.
Your passion and your courage inspire each of us, even as your body struggles.
I don't know what God's got planned for you. I pray that he wants you to prove the doctors wrong one more time.
In the meantime, I can't help but think of the lines from Tim McGraw's song, lines I'm sure you understand better than most of us:
and I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter and I gave forgiveness Id been denying and he said someday I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying.
Godspeed, friend. Be well.
Any Xoops Experts out there?
1 earlier comment in the full thread.
I don't know xoops but IIRC it's a phpNuke derative (and I used to play around with Nuke in the past). The layout seems very nukish anyway. I'll have a look at the newblocks table.
Open [url=http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:6BJsOlRAFhcJ:www.lobby4linux.com/ &hl=nl&gl=nl&ct=clnk&cd=1]http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:6BJsOlRAFhcJ:www.lobby4l...[/url] (the google cache for lobby4linux). Blocks are the things that make up the left and right columns. Blocks can hold several kinds of content. They can hold default block modules (like the login box, who's online, etcetera), they can hold text (stored in the table alongside the rest of the block - e.g the "new linux users" block) or they can point to a user-written php file on the server (from the google cache it doesn't look like there are any).
The blocks admin interface manages what blocks you want to show to which users and at which place. The blocks documentation is at: http://xoopsdocs.net/modules/docs/en/xu-003/online/ch02s05.h...
I suggest using the blocks interface to recreate what the google cache shows.
Quickly scanning over the xoops docs, it looks like the block anmin menu also manages the center column, so the "Welcome" article and the blog-of-helios banner can probabely be found in the blocks menu too.
I don't know jack about Xoops, but I've done some work with MySQL, PostgreSQL and a bit with geeklog. If there's any grunt work I can do to help, just give a yell.
Thank you very much for working to re-hoist that Jolly Roger!
This sad situation has highlighted a problem with using xoops for lobbyb4linux. Like many people, I'm not at all familiar with xoops but I know that a number of us are familiar with other systems. It sounds like it might actually be easier to duplicate the pages in a system that has a larger number of knowledgeable people amongst lxers.
This isn't meant to be a usurping of helios' work. Just an opportunity to continue it until he's available again.
I agree...however, porting at this time would be more labor intensive than fixing. And it also isn't my call since Ken is the one that has to deal with things. Xoops can be a fantastic CMS as evident from dotmil's site http://debcentral.org
You just have to keep it patched and up to date. Ken wasn't able to do that due to his illness and DC trip. We'll get this puppy licked.
I think VarLinux (http://www.varlinux.org - Nick Petreley's personal site) runs on Xoops. You might try asking for help there.
anyways, I gotta test everything now and make sure it works...then we'll be back online. I've made a new look for it while I was at it.
I hope it looks good.
Quoting:Xoops can be a fantastic CMS as evident from dotmil's site
As a Nuke-based CMS I'd rather say clear of it. The Nuke codebase has been plagued with security issues since day one. About two years ago I was pretty deep into Nuke hacking (not cracking, mind you) but their codebase was pretty horrible to work with. I don't know how much it has improved since then, but the code I browsed through yesterday looked awefully familliar to what I worked with two years ago.
Quoting:he Nuke codebase has been plagued with security issues since day one.
Yep..them and e107 can be such a hassle. I steer clear of all of those CMS's if I can. I've found Joomla! and Mambo to be pretty solid so when I think about a new site I generally use that...although at http://mypclinuxos.com I chose to implement mybb...their portal feature will make it really easy to have a robust portal with static pages all while keeping their install at only 672kb. They're really good about patching security holes so I feel pretty fortunate to have found that particular BBS.
The only thing that I've sort of standardized on is my home-grown basecode (a derative of the long awaited phpBB 3.0 Olympus package) which implements basic features like session tracking, user authentication, e-mailing subsystem, database abstraction, smarty (http://smarty.php.net) as the templating engine and a custom mediawiki wikitext parser (for clients who can't grasp HTML). The rest I custom-code for every site I build.
I've started from here: http://drupal.org/node/63796
So far I was able to succesfuly import users, news, articles, forums along with topics and posts.
I'll second that, but migration from XOOPs to Joomla is a 'major' effort.
So, it's not something I can jump right in with. That being said, I don't care for it. Unless it is immediately beneficial to me, I can't use it. This may be short sighted of me...but I like to call it practicality...which on the internet and in website design equally translates into the life or death of a site.
I'd kill any site that I moved to drupal right now because I'd have to learn it (I've tried to learn it twice...installed and played with it for 2 weeks the first time, then appx 4 weeks the second time...It didn't happen).
Look at it another way as well...At the beginning of this thread, I had little interaction with Xoops. Since then, I've learned it and full administration of it as well as their templating system and plugin installation/removal. All over the course of 3 days. THAT is valuable. Drupal holds no value for me.
Drupal has a steep learning curve I guess, and the fact that it does things so differently from most other CMS's is probably a big part of the reason for that. I've managed to figure out nodes though, at least and I feel I'm proficient enough with it to run a site on it, and as I improve I think I'll be able to do some really cool things with it.
The basic difference between Drupal and other CMS's seems to be in that it's modules pretty much all share the same database structure. Most of everything in Drupal is a "node", be it a piece of text, an image or even a sound file. These nodes then have comments assigned to them. In forums, a topic is a node and replies are comments while in an image gallery the image with description is, of course, a node, and the comments to it are.. well comments. :)
Taxonomy seems a bit more complicated. It's just a flexible way of categorizing things in Drupal that allows categorizing content from multiple types of content in same categories, something that is pretty much impossible in other CMS's as far as I know...
Hmm well maybe that brief intro wasn't neccessary, but there. :)
It has its annoyances and some limitations, but the sheer potential of what could be built on it and the ability to customize practically *anything* with some knowledge of PHP is what is getting me to switching sites to it. That and the fact that it's in rapid and stable development and with great future which gives some confidence. Oh and alot of famous sites run on Drupal, from NASA to Mozilla sites. :)
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Helios is a great writer with a unique style. A much needed and highly valued member of this community.
If anyone reading this is going to see him, please pass on a big hug and all that other warm sloppy stuff. Tell him Sal says "you're not allowed to leave us".