Uh uh uh, you didn't say the magic word!

I finally saw Iron Man yesterday. As you may have already heard, it really is a paramount example of its blowey-uppey class of movie, and I recommend it to all.

During its obligatory "computer hacking" scene, I reflected on how much mellower I had become about Hollywood depictions of computer use, compared to myself of a decade ago. Back then I would have made a show of squirming, sighing, and gesticulating helplessly as the hero used her magic hack-u-matic USB dongle to access the bad guy's secret files in under a minute. (And was able to get a live and fluently accurate word-by-word translation of a foreign-speech audio file by typing in "TRANSLATE" while it played.) But now I just let it go, accepting that the reality in which comic-book action movies take place is not this reality. It's one in which nothing really complicated can happen; anything worth doing can be done in a few minutes, especially if it looks cool or blows up at the end. And that's OK.

My moviegoing party involved a couple of folks involved in defense (working for the DoD and a name-brand contractor, respectively), and it was interesting to get their reaction to the film while we had dinner afterwards. One of them remarked at how a lot of movies like this use defense contractors as a plot device that allows a character to equip themselves overnight with fantastic and deadly toys (naming the Green Goblin from Spider-Man as another example), and how this movie furthermore depicted the US military as buying new weapons systems after a brief demonstration, as if they were buying a new washing machine. None of this, he said, accurately depicted the utterly glacial and bureaucracy-clogged pace at which anything actually happens within the real-life Mil-Ind Complex! I thought that was great.

In its defense, I think that Iron Man handled this OK by implying that, upon his return, Tony retreated to the basement to work on his pet mad-science project for an unspecified period of time, while the rest of his company was like "Whatever, dude" and kept on chugging without him. To me it's not important whether or not this makes the situation any more realistic, so much as it was nice they acknowledged the conflict with reality and threw the audience a bone to gnaw on. I am quite willing to gnaw so long as the story's smartly told otherwise, and this one really is.

Project X report

X is chugging along nicely. The skeleton of the logic library is complete, and I'm now fleshing it out through writing a whole mess of unit tests, making sure all the muscles twitch just so. It's hard to imagine a time when I didn't make a habit of test-driven development, even though I started only a couple of years ago. Seeing the panel of lights glow green after adding code is a happy thing, and seeing some turn red is happier, in a way, because I know that here are errors I wouldn't have caught until much later without the tests handy.

I'm champing at the bit to start working on the UI, partly because it terrifies me. But I'm not letting myself do so until every class (or at least every class of class) has at least a couple of tests attached, and there are a lot of classes. There's probably another two or three full work-sessions of test-writing in front of me, and when I do start building the UI I know I will be on my knees thanking my past self for having the patience to do them first.

Moreover, it's past time to seriously engage the game's rights-holder about what they expect to see on their end of the licensing deal. I made a gesture towards this over email last month, and they acknowledged receipt, but we need to have an actual conversation. I've been putting it off because it's less fun than working on code by myself, but I have long since proven to myself that I can accomplish the technical end of this task. Time to refocus long enough to TCB.