Nerdcore 4 Life

I was…let’s say disinclined to see Watchmen for a very long time. It seemed pointless(the story was told as well as it could be in the comic form) and I’ve seen neato special effects before. I couldn’t imagine what this film would have to offer me. Until I saw this:

Is this genius? Not really. Any geek with the time, inclination or an animation studio could have thrown that together during the past 20 years. But that’s kind of what got me excited.
This video was proof that, if nothing else, they got me. They understood what I wanted to see. That doesn’t mean the movie’s good but at least I know if they hit their mark I won’t hate it.

As opposed to say Transformers where apparently they thought my childhood had been lacking in extraneous explosions and characters(really, what was the point of Glen Whitman? if you physically edited all his scenes out of the film could you tell the difference?)

So I broke down and saw it and I give it a meh+
It’s not brilliant and I wonder if anyone who hadn’t read the comic would enjoy it at all. But it didn’t shit on anything. And while the film doesn’t add anything to the story I have to admit that the film version adds some things to the experience. It’s visually very good and it probably uses it’s soundtrack better than any film since Almost Famous.
So if you’re a fan of the comic(graphic novel if you’re feeling upity) then you can see the film without worrying if it will make you question how much you enjoyed the original. You don’t get the brilliance of a whole issue illustrating how Dr. Manhattan experiences time(they cut it to a scene), but you do get to understand why everyone wanted to bang Silk Specter.
But you can also skip it and not worry that you’ve missed anything. At it’s best it’s still a lesser form of the orignial story.

An important part of my project(any project) is documentation. Toward this I looked at quite a few documentation systems and decided to go with Doxys. It’s an extension of the open source Doxegen, but they fixed the HTML output. Doxegen tended to make massive, hard to read pages.

The problem is the guy who wrote Doxys is a programmer. Programmers see a problem and work from the ground up to fix it. Since Doxegen is open source the author was able to get right into the code and make the output exactly what he wanted. Which is good, right?

Except that Doxegen can also output in XML. A system engineer would have looked at that and seen how much easier it would have been to write a program that parses the XML and outputs the HTML from that. Let Doxegen do the heavy lifting and your program can work on the actual problem, hard to read HTML pages.

I admire programmers(I obviously consider myself one) but this mini-asperger thing is probably the biggest problem in software engineering today. Guys with incredible knowledge build programs to do a job and then when the job shifts slightly or there’s a problem with it the team has an impossible time fixing it.  A little forethought would have made Doxys a force to be reckoned with. Put a web interface on an XML parser and you have the greatest documentation tool out there.

Instead you have a slightly less annoying auto documentation system. Which would you rather have your name on?

Note: I’m not mentioning the author by name because I really do appreciate his tool and am thankful for his work, but it just could have been so much more