Funny and Horrific. At the same time!

So today, I had to good fortune to learn about "Chick Tracts". Contrary to what you might initially think, these have nothing to do with women or about tracts of land. No, instead these long comic strips are of the proselytizing variety... I should really just let the work speak for itself. Here is a gem about roleplaying:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow, huh! That was crazy. For citation's sake visit the original
page. At first it reads like a deliciously funny play off of the 1980s
fears about roleplaying... But then... around about where the gal dies, you
relize that its not really all that funny. Oh, and also its being serious...

So in this vein we found a few other chick tracts that are good:

1. Not Even Christian Rock is good Rock
   
2. Love the Jews, lest you get smited
   
3. Islam, the I is for evIl!
   

Pretty crazy stuff... The ultimate chick tract isn't even written by Jack
Chick! You too should learn about the dangers of Galactus!.

I think my team probably lost half a day to this insanity. Its pretty crazy
stuff... I'll try not to insult anyone, but everyone has their crazies...

Oh, and here's a great video about MORMONISM!. Evidently the native americans were once white and from israel, who knew?? The mormons, thats who. In case it wasn't obvious, BTW, I'm not trying to hurt morman faith in any way, but the video is hilarious (I have no idea how closely it matches with their beliefs and a similar video could be made about christanity, probably even more ridiculous!)

Programming and Christmas

So, someone complained to me that my blog hadn't been updated in a while. I admit that that is correct. I've been extremely busy at work. I'm on a big project that keeps sucking all of my time. Also, I've been waiting for a hordes of loyal fans (yes all 2 of you) to comment on Chrome Dawn. Given that no one has, I'm guess no one will. I know a couple of you have definitely given it a look, so tell me what you think!

In other news, Keith and I have finally gotten our Record Stream project up on the web. Check out the project site here. If you want submit access to the project, let me know! For those of you who don't know, RecordStream is a project that takes input (like from log files, configuration files, etc), creates JSON hashes with them, and then gives you a set of tools to slice and dice on the command line. One good example is havn't you ever wanted to grep for a column where the column value is > 5? Well, I have... and RecordStream lets you do that. It also lets you produce some very awesome statistics using recs-collate, like what is the average connect time for each url people access on my site (this would be analyzing apache access logs). Anyway, I'm sure I'll post more about record stream later.

The first version of the code is up on Google Code, we're currently in the middle of re-writing all of the scripts to be modules and adding tests. This is all driven by the recs-chain idea, which is that we'll turn shell pipe chains into in-memory chains, avoiding JSON serialization/deserialization costs. I'm also hoping to get Josh's fast-as-hell collate integrated into RecordStream proper in a manner that all of us can appreciate.

On another note... Unfortunately I won't be making it back to Oklahoma for Christmas. This big project at work is too important for me to be missing around this critical time. I also have extremely few vacation days, what with the 2 emergency trips to Oklahoma back in October and driving Mike to Atlanta back in August. I'm hoping to get back to OK-land this spring or summer though.