better configuration tools for whirr

[piccolbo]

The number of different scripts and configuration is increasing and maintaining them is becoming burdensome. We need a way to parametrize them. There is a patch in whirr trunk to provide arguments to scripts, that should improve the situation on the script side. The proporties files can read environment variables with the {env:MY_VARIABLE} syntax. Another option would be to generate them in R by assigning variables and then calling something like

cat(paste(lapply(ls(pattern="whirr"), function(x) paste(x, "=", eval(as.name(x)))), collapse = "\n"))