For loop of the Almighty

Posted by Jesus on May 4, 2007

Up here in Heaven we have an absolutely incredible network infrastructure. You would be astounded the kind of work true geeks can accomplish when they’re given an unlimited budget and all the freedom they want to play. Our network exists in a state of constant innovation and upgrade, yet nothing ever goes down or locks up, or at least nothing critical. Even the three Windows servers we keep around to study the latest viruses and spam coming out of Earth have uptimes in the thousands of years. Time moves way different up here, but even in Heaven that’s pretty awesome.

In my office I have a few machines, none more important than my Ubuntu box called king. I recently upgraded it to Feisty Fawn, so like some of you I’m going through a bit of an adjustment with some little things. Beryl quit working right, for instance. I could throw a miracle at it or fire up the old omniscience to just know how to fix it, but sometimes even Jesus likes to work things out. I’m a pretty good troubleshooter in my own right, I’ll have you know, and as a recent convert from Gentoo I sort of need something to be broken a little bit to really feel like my Linux desktop is dialed in. I’m sure some of you understand.

In any case I wanted to talk a little bit about geek stuff today, or more specifically I wanted to give you some insight into my day-to-day operations at the office while simultaneously teaching you something. It’s the kind of thing I used to do all the time when I was among you, and it’s always been a part of my character to give back to the community which has given me so much. So while I describe my normal operational day I’ll also do what I can to enlighten some of you to the power of the for loop. How lucky are you?!

On a normal day, which includes every day except Saturday, I’ll crawl out of bed around 6:45am Earth Central Daylight Time. I don’t particularly need to sleep, but I grew to enjoy it while human and it’s just one of those things that’s stuck with me. I get into the office within one hundred thousand billion trillionths of a nanosecond, which is a point sign with enough zeros after it to fill the oceans with Bibles printed full of nothing but those zeros. I usually start by checking my email, which is sorted according to whether you’re God or not. It takes a few hours to read Dad’s morning briefings (He’s incredibly long winded), then I move on to your requests. I try to knock the queue down by at least three-quarters by noon so I can take a long lunch, then when I get back I can usually wrap up your prayers and requests by mid-afternoon. After that I get a massage, shoot eighteen holes with Ben Hogan, Joseph (my sort of biological father), and here lately Ken Lay, and then I settle in for the ugly part of my day - damnations and punishments.

Your sins come in over a really slick amalgam of SNMP and RSS. They’re categorized and filtered by severity, and from there are split off to the various departments for action. Minor sins are handled by angels and people who like to work, while most of the moderate sins are passed on to processing by the Holy Spirit. She kicks a few upstairs to Dad, as do Moses and I in our afternoon sessions handling the major sins which filter through our system. Everyone works differently on Heaven’s network - some people have neat little applications which offer lots of drop-downs and comment fields, while others operate in a web application called HeavenSoft. I prefer to have your sins delivered via email, where I dump your name and your punishment into a script on the command line to feed it directly into the Book of Your Life.

What I’ll do is cat your names out to a bunch of temp files, named things like breast_cancer, tornado_victim, or car_wreck. As I’m culling the major sins I’ll assign names to these various different flat files for later processing. In the end this leaves me with a bunch of files full of names and stuff. From here I could open the file and take one name at a time and input it with the appropriate punishment, but where’s the fun in that? Of course I could just as easily will that they be done, but then I’d be expected to spend the rest of the afternoon with Mother. So as something of a compromise, and because I’m a nerd at heart, I like to use a for loop to commit many of your mortal souls to an eternity of torment in Hell. Here’s how it works:

From the console:

That, children, is the most basic form of for loop. It will take each name in turn from the file damned_to_hell and insert the name into the command line options for the script punish.sh. In this case the “-s” option stands for soul, “-p” represents the recommended punishment for the sin, which can be anything from a_scolding to warts to damnation, and the “-a” option tells the database whether or not a damnation is eligible for appeal. In this case, they all will be. If that were a zero instead of a one, though…

The “i” from the first line is the variable which will hold the name of the damned. Note that instead of passing a name to the punish.sh script I feed it “$i” - this tells the for loop to enter each name in turn, which effectively executes punish.sh once for each name in the list. You might wonder what those little marks around the cat damned_to_hell piece are too. Those are grave accents or back-quotes, and they tell the for loop to use one line at a time from the file damned_to_hell. Simple, right?

What Moses and I will do is spend our time in the afternoons building the lists of people, then run these for loops one after another until the sin queue is empty. Sometimes we talk about his work with The Court, but mostly we play Uno while your punishments are being filed and executed by my Linux workstation. It makes us look incredibly busy, as king constantly has things passing through the screens and updating in the various windows, but in reality it’s just a great way to take the afternoon off and talk about girls and books and politics. Once the sins are filed away and Moses runs off to write more legal briefs I usually sit and work this blog, which I suppose is why it’s usually so negative. I’ve likely just finished damning a whole chunk of you to the fiery abyss and plaguing the rest of you with genital herpes when it comes time to update openjesus.org. It really is hard to come spread cheer after watching king spend most of its afternoon updating damnation tables.

In any case, I hope today’s entry has helped at least a few of you learn a little something about how Heaven processes your sins, and moreover I hope that some of you budding geeks will run off and try out a few for loops yourself. It’s just one of those tools which can not only assist in damning millions of Americans to an eternity of burning, but can just as easily run a list of pings or help massage big chunks of data. It is without question one a skill every person should possess if they want to be brought to Heaven on a work permit. Given the shortage of folks getting past Saint Peter on a valid morality pass I’d say learning or mastering Linux and for loops is just about the best option a lot of you folks have. It’s your life though, you know? If you want to spend the eternity part of it watching your skin bubble and drop from your scorched bones you could just keep spending the short human part of it running Windows.

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