Re: [PLUG] Sad news about Nathan Barwell (Darxus)

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 3:50 AM Michael Toren via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

I'm very sorry to write that Nathan Barwell, who went by the handle Darxus online, died by suicide in December.

Nathan grew up in the Philadelphia area, was an early Linux enthusiast, and an instrumental part of the PLUG community in our early years. He managed our mailing lists, scheduled speakers, sent out the monthly meeting announcements, and updated the website. He created the PLUG history page at http://www.phillylinux.org/history.html, and was the first person to start keeping track of the number of attendees on our meetings page. He also served as our host when we were holding meetings at IQ Group, where he was working at the time, before we outgrew the space and moved elsewhere.

Nathan organized our GPG keysignings, which became such a staple at our meetings that one of the people running the biglumber.com keysigning website commented that PLUG was the most crypto-aware LUG he knew of. Nathan loved visualizations of all kinds, and created tools to plot the web-of-trust we were building out. You can view the output of those tools at http://www.phillylinux.org/keys/historical.html, and see some fun 3D renderings at http://www.chaosreigns.com/code/springgraph/3d.html.

As part of his visualization work, Nathan wrote springgraph — an open-source, drop-in replacement for graphviz's "neato" utility to draw directed graphs — which produced more visually-appealing outputs for the types of things he was graphing. He also added 3D support. His work on springgraph led to him being hired at Akamai and moving to Boston around 2003, where he worked on data analysis and visualizations. Some of the visualizations he created were included in a Wired story about the Slammer worm (https://www.wired.com/2003/07/slammer/).

When he posted to the PLUG list that he was moving to Boston, he wrote (http://lists.netisland.net/archives/plug/plug-2002-09/msg00167.html):

"PLUG has significantly impacted my life. My career would not be where it is. I got one job directly because of PLUG, another influenced by my association with it, and this latest one probably largely affected by the people I have gotten to know through PLUG. Not to mention the number of my close friends that I met through PLUG. Thank you."

As best as I can recall, I first met Nathan through PLUG in 1998, and we fast became friends. I'll miss him terribly.

Nathan struggled with depression for years. Despite often being discouraged, he persisted in seeking wellbeing through exercise (especially running), connecting with people around him, and more recently through therapy and medication.

A memorial service will likely take place in Boston sometime in January. If you'd like more details about the service when they become available, please let me know.

With love,

-mct
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