[tlug] In Memorium: Steve Baur

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

I have some sad news.

The XEmacs community notes with sadness the passing on February 15,
2011, of Steven Lawrence "Steve" Baur, "Mr. XEmacs" from 1996 to 2000,
and a great contributor to open source and Japanese software in other
ways as well.

Born in San Luis Obispo, CA in 1961, Steve was hired out of Cal Tech
by TRW.  After several years in Los Angeles, he returned to San Luis
Obispo to work in a local ISP, and moonlight on the Infodock
extensions to XEmacs for AltraSoft (later BeOpen.com).  Steve was the
release manager for the first "official" Emacs distribution containing
the Multilingual Extensions for Emacs in XEmacs version 20 while still
in California.

In early 1998 Steve came to Japan as a research fellow of the
Multilingualization Lab at the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) in
Tsukuba, followed by stints at Turbolinux in Tokyo (maintainer of
their Japanese-enabled distribution on the DEC Alpha platform) and NEC
in Kobe (where, in a group working on a remote debugger for the Linux
kernel he was the only developer whose development workstation ran
Linux!)  Although never proficient in reading Japanese, he insisted on
adding kanji footnote marks as an option to his footnote minor mode
for Emacsen.  In March 1999, he (with fellow XEmacs maintainer and ETL
researcher, Martin Buchholz) organized ETL's "Multilingualization
Conference 1999" on the theme of "internationalized Emacs."  The high
point of the conference for Steve was the release of XEmacs 21, which
he considered "the closest thing to perfection in a programmer's
editor."

After leaving Japan in 2006, he made his home on Cebu Island in the
Philippines, but (like many Filipinos) went out on "dekasegi",
maintaining the issue tracker (including Emacs support) at Cisco
Systems in San Jose and later in Bangalore, India.

Steve made at least one presentation on XEmacs to TLUG around 1998,
and was a regular at TLUG meetings (especially nomikais, where on one
occasion he achieved a certain ribald infamy) while he was in Tokyo.
He was a great fan of Samoyed dogs, sumo (naming his Alpha workstation
at Turbolinux "Musashimaru"), Linus Torvalds flamage, and World of
Warcraft (not necessarily in that order), and an occasional
contributor to Slashdot (where he was pained to be terribly
misunderstood, frequently having his jokes modded to +3 "Insightful").

He is survived by his wife and three children in Cebu.  He will be
greatly missed, by his friends and by the open source community.

----------------

With apologies for the long delay.  Writing this was not easy.

"Other Steve"