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Meredith and I went to see Idiocracy last night. I was really looking forward to it, mainly because of two reasons 1) Mike Judge, 2) Fox’s shunning. According to every piece of information I’ve read the movie was completely shut down by fox. No marketing, no promos, no t-shirts — NOTHING. But I’ve read lots of reviews on the Intarweb that were very positive and the IMDB database and rotten tomatoes both have lots of reviews and a mostly positive (70%+) rating.

Ugh.

It was funny and the writing was mostly well done but there were really two fundamental flaws. Firstly, the humor and the jokes were all pretty lowbrow. Think “Beavis and Butthead”, not “Office Space”. Lots of potty humor and fart jokes. Secondly, the satirical premise was not biting enough. There were a (very few) places where the scope of current idiocy was alluded to (mostly at the very beginning and very end), but overall — it was still very “even though we’re all dumb as a bunch of fucking stumps, we’re still cool heroes.” I couldn’t tell if that was intentional by Judge or possibly some influence by Fox to attempt not to insult its main constituents.

Overall, the movie was entertaining, but not the “$20 at the box office” type of entertaining. More like the watch it on cable, or maybe — MAYBE — pay-per-view or net-flix.

The best part of the evening was finding BB Rover’s. They’re open ’til 1 am and they  serve food until midnight. That’s good to know because we discovered last night that North(west) Austin is in dire need of more late-night hang-outs. Kirby Lane is about it and they’re always packed solid. BB Rover’s was awesome — some live music outside and plenty of room inside with a good crowd but not packed. It’s pretty much everything I like in a pub — food, free wi-fi, and piles and piles of different beer options (draught and bottle).

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You know what I hate pretty much more than any other code nightmare in the world? The hideous waterfall that is PHP! And it’s not so much about PHP because I’ve managed to use it without doing this ever (really). What in the name of all that is cute and cuddly makes a programmer think this is a good idea:

if (some_condition) {
   print $header;
   print $some_condition;
   print $footer;
} else {
   print $header;
   print $other_condition;
   print $footer;
}

Please, please, PLEASE stop doing this!

Here’s a hint:

print $header;
if (some_condition) {
   print $some_condition;
} else {
   print $other_condition;
}
print $footer;


Ugh! This, more than pretty much anything else, is the single biggest failure of Open Source software. Open Source creates a low barrier of entry, thus allowing anybody to write and publish code. And because said code is mature and relatively bug-free, it is said to “work”, but one of the major tenets of the free software movement is that “If you want to change something, you have the code.” Well, that’s all well-and-good when you want to replace an image or rewrite a string, but it’s a nightmare when you actually want to use the code.

I’ll probably spend the better part of today hacking on this, but I wonder if (in the same amount of time) I would be able to whip something up from scratch that did exactly what I needed and didn’t suck so bad.

And the really bad thing is that it’s a good piece of software — it works and is feature-rich and has a good reputation. But those are all external to code quality (quality as it relates to legibility/extensibility, not functionality).