Michael Bartosh, 28, fell to his death from the balcony of a friend's apartment in Tokyo on Sunday, the victim of a horrible accident. He is survived by his wife, Amber, and the many people who knew him. Within the Mac community, he was best know for his knowledge of OS X Server, which he unhesitatingly shared with others both online and in person. During his life he was an engineer at Apple Computer, authored Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration for O'Reilly, and was CTO of 4AM Media, a consulting firm providing services related to OS X Server. If you've never heard of him, that's okay because the things we share are what bind us together, so it is not surprising that members of the Mac community remember him now in that way.
From an OS X Server thread at Apple Mailing Lists:
I remember in the early days of OS X 10.2. Whenever I posted something to this list I prayed Michael would answer it. He would be kind and courteous no matter how confused and misguided my post was, and always had helpful suggestions or instructions.
Since May of last year, I see over 600 posts from Michael. Likely, every one of those posts is his helping someone. I don't know that he ever actually had a question since he seemed to be the guy who knew everything about the systems we all enjoy so much. His nature of being free with his knowledge was admirable.
We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Tokyo University explains its reasons for installing Macs as 'When compared to Windows, itis easier to introduce a variety of software, and even if thereis trouble, itis easier to fix it yourself.'
Michael had just recently done a site-visit while he had a spare day here in Denver. He was able to fix problems that I've been spending weeks on in merely a 1/2 a day. We were in the process of setting up another day for him to come back out in July. I got the news on this last night and was utterly shocked and saddened, and well, angry at the same time.
There is a eulogy of sorts—well said—from John C. Welch at bynkii.com:
Even more, he knew his shit especially about Open Directory, Kerberos, Active Directory, and integrating all of it. Totally, he knew it, and he knew it better than damned near anyone else who wasn't writing the code. At the real-world integration level, he may have understood it better than the people writing the code.
And, of course, there is a thread in the Macintosh Achaia. Perhaps Chris Law has put it most succinctly and best:
Respect to the man. Rest in peace, hopefully in a place of unlimited RAM and zero-latency storage.