EmmonsNet

The kids and I were watching a lot of kids videos on YouTube a little while ago and much to our delight we saw that the childrens book 'Where The Wild Things Are' is going to be released as a movie this October 16th.

I don't know who is more excited - the kids or me. 

After watching the trailer we had to stomp around the room while we roared our terrible roars and gnashed our terrible teeth and showed our terrible claws!

In a production web environment that has several web servers, databases and mail daemons running countless domains, having a cool set of utilities is key for monitoring, logging and debugging.

A number of scripts I have written can have a 'testing' parameter handed to them so when they are run with that parameter set they will echo out all kinds useful information. Most of the time sending this to a log file for parsing later is good enough. But, sometimes I have a need to watch it as it happens while still writing the output of my script to a file.

Here is where the command 'tee' comes in very handy.

From the man page 'tee' is defined as follows:

 'tee - read from standard input and write to standard output and files'

Simple enough, eh? You bet it is.

For instance, let's say I have written a script called uber-leet-script.sh, but I want to watch the output as it runs and still log the output to a file called 'uber-leet-script.out'. Just for simplicity, we will assume both the script (which I have chmod'd 755) and the file I want to log the output to are in the same directory.

I would run my script like so from the command line:

$ ./uber-leet-script.sh | tee ./uber-leet-script.out

Once I hit enter, I see all the output. Sometimes the bug in my script will be blatently obvious in what I see from the output and I can just CTRL-C it on the spot. Other times it may scroll past so fast and I could miss the telling bit of output. No problem there because I have the file, uber-leet-script.out to parse through until my heart's content.

The first time I heard Anthrax jump out of my stereo, mosh across my room to dive boot first through my ears and stomp around inside my grey matter - I was in love. Not like that 'Shall I Compare Thee to a Summers Day' variety of love either. This was that balls-to-the-wall-appetite-for-destruction kind of lust that only gets appeased by a generous helping of army surplus boots, chains, stained torn denim and leather.

The music and words of Anthrax never overtly condoned violence. But it sure made it a point of yelling 'f**k the system and the horse it drug in with it' at the top of your longs before diving into human miasma of slam dance at your local 'ard core show.

I listened to their music a lot - especially while reading comics. Their music always seemed like a fitting soundtrack for the life of Lobo - aka The Main Man.

I read a few minutes ago that Scott Ian - rythmn guitarist and co-founder for Anthrax - is writing the DC Comics two issue Lobo mini-series that is scheduled to rip and destroy it's way into your local comic book shop this November.

Long time comic geeks will no doubt know exactly who Lobo is. My first encounter with him was way back in the DC title, The Omega Men. My first thoughts were 'WTF?? A sadistic clown in orange and purple tights? He should consider therapy.' As his character festered and fermented within the DC universe Lobo traded in stupid spandex for leather, chains and a meat hook, He started to personify all the angst and longing for rebellion that many fans reach to comics to see dealt with in a way that would be completely inappropriate and totally illegal in the real world. If it were not for comics and characters like Lobo - I suspect scarey people with rifles would find themselves atop college bell towers more often.

He got cooler despite his make up being compared to something James O'Barr would have created. There was no tragic emo like drama about Lobo. He is what he is and at any given moment he is going to 'f**k the system and ride off with its horse'.

I am really looking forward to seeing the treatment Scott Ian gives to Lobo. His performance with the band has never left me disappointed or bored. I hope he brings the same creative rebellion to add new chewy pulp and guts to one of DC Comics greatest rebels.

Okay, it's been almost ten days since Google announced their Chrome OS. Ever since that date, all I seem to see on the IT news, geeks sites and blogs is wild speculation as to what the big G's strategy is going to be to beat the snot out of Microsoft on the desktop market.

Frankly, I am tired of seeing all the reading all the drivel by industry speculators that seem to dismiss or are completely ignore a few key truths about the desktop computing market.

The first thing these armchair industry watchers seem to miss is what Google put out there in plain black and white:

 "The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies."

First, I want to point out something many people seemed to miss: Linux kernel.

All of those millions of users that would have no idea how to be productive without MS Office apps? I know - I work with about a dozen of them, and if their office products does not say MS on it somewhere with a stupid paperclip talking to them when they fat finger the wrong key - they are lost and forget how to tab their way through the simplest spreadsheets. Last time I checked, MS does not build office, Access, Power Point or any of their other garbage productivity applications for the linux kernal. So for the herds of office workers around the word will not be running anything but windows anytime soon.