Paul M. Jones

... once you have a chief executive chosen by popular election, you are in trouble. The “extreme” measure of the legislature removing the head of state happens much more readily in parliamentary systems ... we are just about the only country without a parliamentary system that isn’t pretty far along on the autocracy spectrum.

... the problem with popular election of Prime Ministers, and especially of Presidents, is that they become much more powerful than legislatures. They have national legitimacy, they can present a unified front, and they can dominate the news media. Separation of powers is a pipedream.

via The Constitution, the President and Us | askblog.

Make them fire you. If you resign under pressure you have basically no legal standing. Make. Them. Fire. You. If they pressure you to resign, you should write a letter, declining to resign, declining to take any responsibility for your private, off-duty, speech and/or actions. Specifically point out that you are exercising your personal discretion to engage in political and social commentary regarding current events, that you are not willing to be subjected to a hostile work environment for your unorthodox political views, and that you are not willing to explain or defend or justify those personal political views.

Always make them do their own dirty work.

via Vox Popoli: Mailvox: employment advice.

As server-side web developers, we tend to think of our templating system as providing the View layer in a Model-View-Controller architecture. I have recently come to the conclusion that this is an incorrect approach. Instead, we need to think of the HTTP response as the View.

When an HTTP client makes an HTTP request, what does it get in return? It does not receive only the body of the HTTP response. The client receives the body and the headers of the HTTP response. The response as a whole is what the web application delivers as its presentation to the client.

Templating systems, as far as I can tell, deal only with the body of the HTTP response. In practice, the rest of the response is generally handled by the Controller; for example, setting the status, setting cookies, and modifying headers.

Let's say we accept the idea that the HTTP response is the View (i.e., the presentation that is delivered to the client). If we accept that idea, then for a clean separation of concerns a la SeparatedPresentation, we need to combine both the template work and the header work into their own layer. That layer needs to be completely separated from the Controller and Model.

Thus, anything that deals with the response, including the setting of headers, should be considered the View layer. If you are setting headers in a Controller, you are losing that clean separation of concerns. To remedy this, your Controller needs to hand off to a layer that builds the response on its own; this is the proper place for the tempalting system to be invoked, not the Controller.

In summary: the template is not the View. The response is the View. We should separate our concerns accordingly.

Afterword

If you like the line of thinking presented here, please check out the Action-Domain-Responder refinement of the MVC pattern. It's still a work-in-progress so be sure to leave your comments and criticism either here on this blog or as a new issue at Github.

Read the Reddit discussions about this post here and here.

The arrestee alleges she was assaulted and beaten by a Federal agent; the magistrate, before he will let her post bail, wants her to recant her allegations as a condition of bail.

This seems to me clearly unconstitutional: It’s an order compelling speech, on threat of imprisonment, which would itself normally be a First Amendment violation; but on top of that, it was issued without a trial, and thus without any final factual findings supporting its validity.

I’m aware that, once someone is convicted, courts have considerable latitude to impose speech restrictions as a condition of parole or probation, and might even be able to impose speech compulsions. But that is after someone’s guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial. The defendant here hasn’t been convicted of anything; she continues to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

via Arrestee alleges government misconduct; federal magistrate orders arrestee to apologize and recant, as a condition of bail.

Here's a little more, from a different article:

One agent, realizing they did not have a warrant for that address, directed other agents to leave the premises. Then, according to Branson, another agent, the one who allegedly choked Arielle Lipsen, told Branson he had to leave. At that point, Branson asked to see a warrant.

“He said, ’I don’t need to show you a F-----g warrant.’"

Branson said, "I need to see a warrant, based on the fourth amendment…"

"The agent answered ‘Oh you’re a F-----g lawyer now. We can do this the easy way or the hard way and put his finger on the trigger of his M16. That’s when I just backed up,” Branson said.

According to Branson the alleged assault to Lipsen happened in plain view, on the sidewalk in front of a residence.

“It happened outside on the sidewalk, " stated Branson, "She wasn’t even on the property. She was standing on the sidewalk.”

It only gets worse from there. Via Bold witness to alleged abuse by federal agents comes forward.

This article about being able to be graduated by university applies to developers, too: begin by substituting "your first few projects" for "high school" and "the development community at large" for "college".

You may think you are smart because you got high grades in high school, but the reality is that you’re not really as smart as you think you are; you just went to a high school where everyone was stupid so you just seem smart in comparison.

Compared to the much smarter students who normally attend our college, you’re going to find yourself at the bottom of the class. While the smarter students find passing their classes to be relatively easy, and even fun, that’s not going to be the case for you. For you, college will be hard work, difficult and unpleasant, if you want to graduate.

You have the ability to graduate if you put in the effort, and take advantage of the extra tutoring services we have available for you, but college will not be a fun experience for you. I still recommend that you attend our college, but if you think that you’re not willing to work very hard, to study while the smarter kids are having fun at beer parties, then you would be better off not attending our college.

via Who gets to graduate? | Lion of the Blogosphere.

(Title quote from Moses Ngone.)

First, you will discover that people in general are extremely reluctant to admit error. People will defend an opinion or an action until the end, even if every bit of logic and evidence runs contrary. Sincere apologies and genuine admissions of error and wrongdoing are the rarest things in this world. There is no point at all in demanding apologies or in becoming resentful when they fail to appear. Just move on. Neither should you expect to always be rewarded for being right. On the contrary, people will often resent you and try to take you down.

Via Tucker on the Young Unemployed, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty (and the subtitle is via R. A. Heinlein).

A nice note from Brett Bieber:

Five years ago today, a group of PHP framework thought leaders came together to discuss interoperability and coordination. We met in a small room, talked our issues out together, agreed and disagreed respectfully.

At the time we were labeling our cause: "PHP Standards and Best Practices for PHP 5.3+ Frameworks and Libraries"

For better or worse, the group has evolved since then, but my hope is for continued success and interoperability.

Congrats to all the members, new and old.

Via the PHP-FIG Google Group.

I've been asking for feedback on the Action-Domain-Responder pattern, a refinement of MVC, to discover how it's being used in the wild already, and to solicit criticism of the pattern to find weak points.

The key points of Action-Domain-Responder:

• Instead of a controller class with many action methods, each Action is its own class (or closure, like with Slim).

• The Action interacts with the Domain (model), and feeds data to a Responder (view).

• The Responder is entirely responsible for building the response, including all headers as well as the body of the response. This means that in ADR, the template is not the view; the response is the view.

Stephan Höchdorfer has been using single-Action classes for a while now. Here is my summary of his article:

• "we are using action classes in our application framework for almost the last decade"

• "action classes tend to be rather small, typically less than 100 loc for us"

• "another bonus point for action classes: It is easier to search for a class name than a method name"

• "Controllers tend to have a lot of dependencies. ... people came up with a few "creative" solutions for this problem, mainly the creation of lazly loaded dependencies"

• "action classes depend on what they really needed. Typically that's just a few services for a single action. Again that makes the code way easier to understand and easier to test."

• "Action classes in contrast to controller classes can be reusable."

Those were the highlights for me; you should read the whole essay to find your own: http://blog.bitexpert.de/blog/controller-classes-vs.-action-classes

In addition, please write up your own commands and criticism regarding Action-Domain-Responder, so that I can improve the offering as much as possible.

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

The Business and the Programmers want the same thing. They want the same thing: to deliver a more predictable stream of important features that will make the market happy--or, at least, knowing the fickle market, that will risk disappointing them the least.

This. Is. Glorious.

The Business and the Programmers needs to agree on two things, each conceding a key point to the other. The Business needs to agree that the Programmers have heretofore gone more quickly than they really can, that they cannot sustain this pace, and that to do so merely hastens the ultimate decline of the entire product line, and perhaps the company. The Programmers need to agree that the Business has a legitimate need to deliver more features, that everyone’s livelihood depends on this, and that trying to ask for more than the Programmers can deliver forms part of the Business’s “job”, as it were. The market compels them to do this. In this equation, the Programmers have the responsibility to do whatever they can to maximise their ongoing delivery speed, and that includes regular, agreessive refactoring.

Finally, both the Business and the Programmers have to agree that they have wasted too much time arguing about this and need to move forward. They want the same thing! They can have it!

via The Eternal Struggle Between Business and Programmers - The Code Whisperer.

Aura.View 2.0.0-beta1 is a reduced implementation of the v1 View package. ...

The templates can still be include files, but (and this is new) they can also be closures. This means that you can completely avoid the file system for templates if you like. ...

There are no longer any escapers or helpers included, although the package does include a bare-bones HelperRegistry so you can add your own callables as helpers.

...

Aura.Html 2.0.0-beta1 contains a collection of helpers extracted from the v1 Aura.View package. These helpers are completely standalone and are not dependent on any particular view system: instantiate a HelperLocator from the Aura.Html package and you can use the helpers from any PHP code. ...

All of the HTML5 input types are supported. This makes building form elements very easy, especially since the data structure for each element is just an array. Any library that can generate the recognized array structure can be used to feed the form input helpers. ...

In addition, [Aura.Html] includes a powerful escaping mechanism derived from ZendEscaper and modified for conceptual integrity with the rest of Aura. The Aura.Html Escaper exposes static methods to make escaping as non-verbose as possible.

Read the whole thing at http://auraphp.com/blog/2014/05/15/view-html-2beta1/!