Binu Jose Philip's Weblog

Hatfull of Sky

Finished reading Terry Pratchett's "Hatful of Sky". Laughed enough, felt the familiar feel good stretch after I put it down. Although I have to admit, this time I didn't read it in the usual "deeep breath, until finish do I sit here" style. My daughter (4 months) takes prime spot. Most of it was read in the loo and part of the rest with her sitting on the book or by reading to her. The reading was interspersed with my evil cackles which interested her far more than the story line.

This book again has the "Edge Witch" or the "When push comes to shove" problem. A real witch has to work on the edge of things and incidents, and a real witch has to take a decision whether others like it or not. Do we have it in us to make the correct decision and not the nice decision? After finishing the book I took some decisions which only time will tell whether they were correct or just nice. Putting it that way, I would have taken decisions even if I didn't read the book ;-)

I am now trying to get pygtk to display SMF dependencies of a given service properly. When I started of, I had decided on a minimal ascii only display. I thought that the real problem is in extracting the dependency, not in displaying it. After watching screen-fulls of ascii tree scroll by I concluded that a good output is part of the problem and not just extracting dependancies. I have done something I don't like here, calling "svcs -abcdef...." to get me what I want. I hate it when child processes dangle at the end of a pipe. The correct approach would be to write a python binding for libscf (yup not libsmf!) and get myself a progasm. But with python it is all so painless, I end up not designing enough. That is Bad. I won't blame Python for that either.

Posted at 04:03PM Apr 12, 2006 by binujp in Paperclip  |