Ettore, my very dear friend passed away yesterday, December 10th, and has left a big void in my life, and the life of his friends, people he worked with, and people he collaborated with. Hard to think that we were exchanging e-mails just a couple of days ago, and that we were discussing photography two weeks ago in New York, and having greek dinner last week.
I first met Ettore in real life in Paris after we had known each other over the internet for over a year. Ettore he had contributed to Gnome the first docking toolbar and for this occasion we arranged to meet in Paris. In that meeting, he outlined his vision for a file manager (gnome-fm) and we designed the first pass at the gnome-vfs. Eventually, these would become Nautilus, today's GNOME file manager.
Ettore did not hesitate to leave his job to join Nat and myself in the adventure that would be Ximian. He was the second employee at Ximian, and started working on turning the HTML engine into a full-blow editor, this work is in active use today in Evolution. Later on, he became the leader for the Evolution project, which is in use now by thousands of users.
The first time I met Ettore, he and Clara cooked for me a new dish that until that point was unknown to me: spaghetti carbonara, which I loved. Year after year, every time I would prepare it, I would remember fondly how they taught me to make it.
Chema was a great loss a month ago, and this comes as a second very hard moment for our group of friends. Terrible moments like this are a reminder that we should enjoy every minute of our lives and cherish the frienships of everyone we know, on the internet and on the real life.
We are going to miss you bambino.
Posted on 12 Dec 2003