The untimely death of old colleague DK found me far away and I was not in a position to attend the service. So in order to honor my friend (he _was_ a friend despite that we did not meet as friends do; he cared) I will remember three stories of him and me:
The weird traceroute
This must have happened around 1998 or 1999. DK was working at the UoA NOC and I was working at the NTUA NOC. He observed that traceroutes to http://www.xoom.com were blocked but tracert (from Windows machines) was working. He mentioned this in the mailing list and he sent me down a rabbit hole to learn stuff. I’d not have bothered had he not asked. He was that kind of guy, he asked and you felt the need to help him out.
Sun’s screen
Still before 2000, this is a time when people write greeklish because different operating systems and window systems treat Greek differently and the path of least resistance is Greeklish. To assist this path of least resistance I had modified the code of script.c in order to translate Greek text to greeklish on the terminal. This worked fine with Linux and any BSD system. Dimitris complained that it did not work with Solaris. Back in the day, you had to have a special license to have access to Solaris code. Well, DK had, and he sent me the required files, I sent him back my version and he promptly sent be back a patch to improve this even further.
Goldratt’s simulation
If you’ve read The Goal, you know there’s an interesting simulation described there. There are a few blog posts and papers dealing with this, one of them being A Simulation Based on Goldratt’s Matchstick/Die Game. I had no access and I wanted to read it. DK had and he shared his copy with me.
This is how we reconnected on twitter after some years
Farewell my friend. It was me who was proud to be talking with you from time to time; I learned stuff.
Managing organized complexity 
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