Wonderful news. danielk (Daniel Elstner) is alive. I was really starting to worry that something fatal must have happened. But frehberg tracked him down in Berlin. It doesn't sound like things are going so well, but I'm just incredibly glad that he's still in the world.
It sounds like Daniel is looking for work, so someone should snap him up as soon as possible now that I'm putting the word out. He's simply the best programmer that I've ever encountered either in real life or open source.
He can make all the right decisions to design perfect architectures, and he can solve the in-depth problems that most people think are so difficult that they are impossible. And what he writes lasts, without all the niggly corner-case problems that most people end up with. He knows what the user needs at the same time as knowing what the OS and and compiler and processor needs – that is incredibly unusual. His knowledge of C++, and of linux and GNOME, is astounding. As if that wasn't enough, he has an amazing ability to explain all of that stuff to other people.