Monday, December 17, 2007

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.

4 comments:

Dave Goodell said...

Congratulations on getting recs up for the rest of the world. It was crazy useful for so many things back at Amazon. Let me know what you think of Google Code, I haven't heard too much feedback one way or the other, and it might be useful someday for projects of my own.

Ben said...

Yeah, we were actually going to go for sourceforge, but it doesn't have an automated project creation... You have to wait for "approval". Since I wanted source control NOW, I wasn't willing to wait for that, so we bailed to google code. Its been cool so far, but I've only really used it for source control so far.

-Ben

Anonymous said...

Ah, yes, Chrome Dawn.

(And it appears I never got back to you about house rules for attacks of opportunity-- the gist of our house rule is no chains of AoO, and if something in the rulebook is clearly ridiculous it gets thrown out. Helpful, eh?)

Chrome Dawn does have some awesome descriptions-- you were quite right there. I also like the fact that I see the fun parts of Shadow Run (ie, character creation and using the character's super awesome abilities) but many fewer of the niggling bits.

That sucks about Christmas, but I understand the no-leave part. Last year when Christmas rolled around I had a whole 40 minutes of leave accrued, and had to be back at work on the 26th. :-/ This year in retaliation I'm taking the 26th through the 31st off.

Ben said...

Thanks I thought the descriptions were particularly awesome. I think my favorite line of progression was the Vehicular combat cyber skates... Very delicious :)

That is just about what I was going to do for AoOs, I'm always a big fan of throwing out things that don't make sense.