Remove hardcoded paths

* added helper functions to return variables for system we are running on
* removed hardcoded paths and socket type

This will allow us to expand to other operating systems without changing too many files. 
Two things:

1. I'm not sure what this comment means.  
2. You generally shouldn't put your name in comments, source control can always tell us who wrote something.
3. If you want to leave yourself a TODO, that's an exception, in which case we generally do something like

    TODO(gsamfira): Replace this with proper cross platform support.