(no subject)

Well, I've got 90 minutes to go on Key the Metal Idol. The second of two very long episodes, that wrap up the first 13. In typical anime fashion, the first long episode was almost entirely filled with expository dialogue that had the dual effect of explaining all the past mysterious events, and turning the plot entirely on it's head.

Anyone who's seen Akira, Ghost in the Shell, the Vampire Hunter D movies, Serial Experiments Lain, or, hell, any episode of Robotech, knows what I'm talking about. There's always that point where "The Big Conversation" takes place, and everything suddenly goes to hell. The hero turns out to be a demon. The villain turns out to be a small-time lackey. The vampire turns out to be an astronaut. The government agency and the crime syndicate switch labels. The lecherous old man turns out to be Master Boo-Yong Shai, Hyper Space Police Murder Detective 003.

I just wrote some Perl! I so proud! Time for a donut.

Wires and string and tunnels

Sometimes, when I'm sitting at the console happily clicking away, I stop and marvel at the complexity of my pastime.

I just wrote a script in Perl that takes a raw binary database file from the ICQ 2001 program and spiders through it, extracting all the messages, URLs, file exchanges, and contact list events. It writes this data out to a tab-delimited file, which another script then slurps up and translates into database records in an SQL database running on the internal network socket.

This data is, in turn, highly referenced by a set of perl scripts that run through the CGI wrapper off a bunch of HTML forms, also served off the internal network socket. Through a cooperative exchange, they combine the ICQ logs with archived emails, journal entries, schoolwork, irc chats, and JPEG and GIF images, into a browseable and searchable module, with a calendar view and subsections in HTML frames. All password protected and isolated from the outside network.

What kind of sick twisted freak would consider this a hobby? And yet I bop right along, coding away, chasing down bugs and swimming in the documentation. Every time I come back to this I rediscover how stimulating and inspiring the whole practice can be.

Oh well, if my job skills as a web coder fail me, I can always fall back on the tried-and-true path to profit -- being a "rock star". >:)