I wanted to play with Facebook's Thrift RPC tool tonight, but it doesn't seem happy on freebsd. It fails somewhere in ./configure and I have no patience to go swimming through automake/autoconf code to solve it. I'll just assume Thrift was designed in a linux-centric manner and that it's a waste of my time trying to fix something I may not even need.

So, I moved on and am going to play with ice. The manual isn't too scary, and I'd already be playing with it but the compile is taking ages. Maybe it won't suck ;)

I do enough ad-hoc data analysis with grok, it seems like a fun adventure to write some tool that accepts patterns and data input and gives you the results. Rather than reinvent the rpc wheel, it's probably worth learning a cross-platform rpc library.