Paul M. Jones

This is the first of three posts I intend to make regarding the condition and actions of the FIG, and what they reveal.

The Past

The show trial and subsequent vote to remove me has concluded, and I remain: the complainants were defeated, 15 to 9.

Now that the vote is done, I can assert openly that this was a “clearing the decks” operation. It was intended (in large part) to remove the most-vocal opponent to the FIG 3.0 proposal by Larry Garfield and Michael Cullum, and to prepare the way for implementing the Contributor Covenant (or some other SJW-inspired code of conduct). I predicted that conversations about both would resume very soon after the vote no matter which way it went, and that looks to have been prescient.

The complainants, and their secretarial collaborator, wanted a vote (not mediation) from the outset. I guess they figured it would be a slam-dunk to have me removed. What they didn’t expect was that roughly half of the participants would be either against my removal, or against the complainants themselves.

So instead of a slam-dunk, they had actual resistance on their hands. That’s why the secretarial collaborator dragged it out past the 2-week point, so there could be some chance of rallying support for the “removal” side. Little support was raised that was not shortly pushed-back against.

Then the complainants realized they had no options other than a vote, which they now thought they might lose. This is why they revived the idea of “alternative resolutions”. But they themselves presented no alternatives other than “shut up” and “go away”.

Even at the end, to keep their actions and their bias hidden, the secretaries suggested (to me personally) making the vote private, on authority they have not been granted.

Remember: the secretaries, in particular Michael Cullum, overstepped their bounds once again to enable this drama.

Even so, I must caution against reading too much into the results of the vote. The voters did not approve of me per se, so much as they disapproved of the complainants, the complaint itself, or the act of throwing someone out. It is not so much a vindication for me personally, as a repudiation of the complainants.

This is now all in the past, and a permanent part of the FIG. Tomorrow I will talk about the current state of the FIG.

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

I am currently modernizing a legacy PHP application for a client. (The codebase was written earlier this year, in fact; new code can be "legacy" from the outset.) The original developer pulled a dirty trick with global that I had not seen before, and I thought I had seen everything.

Legacy codebases often use global to import a variable into the local scope, usually a global function. For example, they might drag in a database connection:

<?php
// define $db in a config file somewhere
$db = new DatabaseConnection(...);

// this function uses the $db connection via global
function fetch_user_by_id($id)
{
    global $db;
    return $db->fetchAssoc("SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = ?", $id);
}
?>

I see that kind of thing all the time in legacy PHP. However, what I have not seen before is a function exporting a global.

Take a look at the following code. If the $bar variable is not already defined in the global scope, PHP will define it in the global scope for you automatically when you call foo().

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);

function foo()
{
    global $bar;
    $bar ++;
}

// $bar is not defined yet, so PHP will show an
// "undefined variable" notice
echo $bar. PHP_EOL;

// calling foo() defines $bar in the global scope,
// and increments it
foo();

// $bar is now available in the global scope, having
// been exported from function foo()
echo $bar. PHP_EOL;

The legacy developer did that because he wanted to keep the variable initialization outside of the global scope for some reason, even though he used the variable in the global scope elsewhere.

It is exceptionally difficult to track down where an exported global is coming from when refactoring a legacy application. If you must write legacy code using globals, initialize them in the global scope. Better yet, don't use globals at all: pass values as function arguments, or use dependency injection techniques.

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

As long as the Muslim population remains around 1% of any given country they will be regarded as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to anyone. In fact, they may be featured in articles and films, stereotyped for their colorful uniqueness.

At 2% and 3% they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs.

From 5% on they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population.

They will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves -- along with threats for failure to comply.

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islam is not to convert the world but to establish Sharia law over the entire world.

When Muslims reach 10% of the population, they will increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions ( Paris --car-burnings). Any non-Muslim action that offends Islam will result in uprisings and threats ( Amsterdam - Mohammed cartoons).

After reaching 20% expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings and church and synagogue burning.

At 40% you will find widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks and ongoing militia warfare.

From 60% you may expect unfettered persecution of non-believers and other religions, sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels.

After 80% expect State run ethnic cleansing and genocide.

100% will usher in the peace of 'Dar-es-Salaam' -- the Islamic House of Peace -- there's supposed to be peace because everybody is a Muslim:

Of course, that's not the case. Muslims then start killing each other for a variety of reasons.

Edited for brevity, from What Islam Isn't; see the original for lists of percentages and countries.

Let us take the second [argument] first. And let us strip it of the illegitimate emotional power it derives from the word ‘stagnation’ with its suggestion of puddles and mantled pools.

If water stands too long it stinks. To infer thence that whatever stands long must be unwholesome is to be the victim of metaphor. Space does not stink because it has preserved its three dimensions from the beginning. The square on the hypotenuse has not gone moldy by continuing to equal the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Love is not dishonored by constancy, and when we wash our hands we are seeking stagnation and “putting the clock back,” artificially restoring our hands to the status quo in which they began the day and resisting the natural trend of events which would increase their dirtiness steadily from our birth to our death.

For the emotive term ‘stagnant’ let us substitute the descriptive term ‘permanent.’ Does a permanent moral standard preclude progress? On the contrary, except on the supposition of a changeless standard, progress is impossible. If good is a fixed point, it is at least possible that we should get nearer and nearer to it; but if the terminus is as mobile as the train, how can the train progress towards it? Our ideas of the good may change, but they cannot change either for the better or the worse if there is no absolute and immutable good to which they can recede. We can go on getting a sum more and more nearly right only if the one perfectly right is “stagnant”.

And yet it will be said, I have just admitted that our ideas of good may improve. How is this to be reconciled with the view that “traditional morality” is a depositum fidei which cannot be deserted? The answer can be understood if we compare a real moral advance with a mere innovation. From the Stoic and Confucian, “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you”; to the Christian, “Do as you would be done by” is a real advance. The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation.

The first is an advance because no one who did not admit the validity of the old maxim could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who accepted the old would at once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle. If he rejected it, he would have to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as something simply heterogeneous from his own ideas of value.

But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all. It is the difference between a man who says to us: “You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?” and a man who says, “Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.”

Real moral advances, in fine, are made from within the existing moral tradition and in the spirit of that tradition and can be understood only in the light of that tradition. The outsider who has rejected the tradition cannot judge them. He has, as Aristotle said, no arche, no premises.

(Extra line breaks added for readability.) Source: The Poison of Subjectivism, in which I am reminded how much I like C. S. Lewis' writings.

The advantages of Free Trade are lower prices for stuff. That means they are more cheaply produced. As the economist David Ricardo wrote, there is a principle of comparative advantage that coupled with free trade guarantees maximum profits for when there are no trade restrictions, and impediments to free trade are supposed to be mutually disadvantageous.

But do understand, what is conserved is lower prices. Nor social stability. Not communities. Not family life. Indeed those are often disrupted; it’s part of the economic model. Under free trade theory, it’s better to have free trade than community preservation, better to have ghost towns of people displaced because their jobs have been shipped overseas; better to have Detroit as a wasteland than a thriving dynamic industrial society turning out tail finned Cadillacs and insolent chariots and supporting workers represented by rapacious unions in conflict with pitiless corporate executives.

Source: Back to Normal. Beginning a discussion of Free Trade by Jerry Pournelle. He goes on to say that a "conservative" should ask himself, "What precisely is being conserved?"

Because of this "What is a senior developer?" conversation on Reddit, I am reminded of the Construx Professional Development Ladders, as mentioned to me long ago by Alejandro Garcia Fernandez. Here is a sample ladder for developers.

Higher-than-average intelligence doesn't make you any better than anyone else, any more than being taller, or faster, or stronger does. What it often does, however, is allow others to convince you that you should be something different than you are, or than you want to be. Even worse, it gives you the ability to successfully rationalize away your failures, to both yourself and others.

Nassim Taleb says something similar. Too often, "being smart" makes you better at rationalizing, not better at being rational. How much the worse if you make "being smart" part of your identity. (File under "being smart is overrated.")

Source: Vox Popoli: Always an excuse.

"Argument from fallacy" is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false. It is also called argument to logic (argumentum ad logicam), fallacy fallacy, fallacists fallacy, and bad reasons fallacy. Fallacious arguments can arrive at true conclusions, so this is an informal fallacy of relevance.

Emphasis mine, via Argument from fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1. Let us agree that no framework of interpretation can be demonstrated conclusively to be correct.

2. Let us proceed to rely on a framework of interpretation that explains all social phenomena in terms of the concepts of race, gender, privilege, and power.

Source: The Post-Modernist Swindle | askblog

On reflecting over the discussions surrounding the proposed PSR for HTTP middleware (on which I am coordinator), I realized there's no reason there should *not* be a "request-only" PSR-7 middleware dispatcher.

So, here is Telegraph to fill that void.

Built over this past weekend, Telegraph is essentially a copy of Relay, which is a "request+response" middleware dispatcher. (There are a couple of minor differences.)

I also took the time to port the existing Relay middleware over to Telegraph. You can find the Telegraph middleware here.

I was asked over the weekend, "Is this a sign that the HTTP middleware proposal is moving from request+response to request-only?" (/me shrugs) I just figure if there's such a need for something like that, perhaps it should be made available.

Oh, and I was able to quality-check and release it using Producer.

Enjoy!

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.