Paul M. Jones

I am the first one to admit that I am not a UI/UX/design person. I believe wholeheartedly that the inmates are running the asylum when they shouldn’t be.

The project page at http://auraphp.github.com/ has substance, but no style, and style is so important. Can anyone recommend a good design guy who is interested in working his craft on an open-source project, where the only payment will be appreciation and good-will?

(Incidentally, that person is likely to end up being the lead advisor for anything related to style in the Aura libraries.)

Leave a comment, or email me directly, if you have a lead. Thanks!

Cal Evans has posted his interview with yours truly: Interview with Paul M. Jones | Voices of the ElePHPant. Thanks for inviting me, Cal!

Measuring from the first Subversion commit, Solar was 6 years old on 14 Feb 2011. The project has come a long way since then, and has evolved from a collection of library classes with some content domain models, to a general purpose framework.

Moore’s Law tells us computer power doubles about every 18 months; it’s how we measure generations for computers. 6 years is 4 generations, which makes Solar the equivalent of an 80 to 100 year old person. Just like with a mature person, there is a great deal of knowledge and craft embedded in Solar, but it also still shows its roots and carries the weight of decisions from early in its life.

With all that in mind, it’s time to start working on Solar version two, using the formal namespaces and other features of PHP 5.3. There are some other very significant changes on the way as well.

The first change is the name of the project. Even though Solar (the PHP 5 framework) came first, the name is too easy to confuse with Apache Solr (the search system). So, after some discussion with others, Solar v2 will be called Aura.

The second change is in the fundamental organization of the project. Solar became a full-stack framework very quickly, with all classes descending from a base class, and using and a service locator to manage dependencies. By comparison, Aura is a collection of independent library packages; it uses no base classes, and is oriented toward a dependency injection container proper to manage dependencies. Aura also has an additional “system” package that assembles those libraries into a cohesive framework (the way Solar is now). That way, those who want to use only one or two Aura packages can do so, and developers who want a full framework can also get what they need.

There are lots of other significant changes, and I expect I’ll write about those in the future. Until then, if the project sounds interesting, you can find the Github repos at https://github.com/auraphp. Aura also has a mailing list at https://groups.google.com/group/auraphp, and you can join the IRC room on Freenode at #auraphp.

Meanwhile, Solar will keep getting as much love and attention as it has over the past year or so. But I do expect, eventually, that we will be able to extract all the best Solar behaviors to Aura. Solar won’t ever really go away (software projects almost never do), but I expect it will be eclipsed by Aura at some point in the future.

You can see what Aura looks like by examining the various Aura packages already in place:

• Aura.Autoload, an autoloader package
• Aura.Di, a dependency injection container,
• Aura.Router, a web routing system,
• Aura.Signal, a signal slots / event handler implementation,
• Aura.Cli, a collection of command-line tools, and
• the system package that provides a framework around the libraries

Take a look around; I hope PHP 5.3+ developers who want independent library packages will like what they see.

Public servants -- meaning government employees -- don’t work for greedy miscreants exploiting them for personal profit. They work for democratically elected officials representing the will of the people. This is just one reason why there is no legitimate role for government unions, and there should be no collective bargaining rights for public servants.

Since public servants work for the people, their wages, benefits, and working conditions are set in accordance with the will of the people, as determined by the democratic process. This is why it is not legitimate to ask the people to compromise with public servants in collective bargaining. And this is why the pay, benefits, and working conditions for federal workers are set by acts of Congress, not through collective bargaining.

If public servants do not like the pay, benefits, and working conditions offered to them by the people as determined through the democratic process, nothing requires them to be public servants. This is why public servants are not slaves without collective bargaining, as soon-to-be-unemployed collective bargaining agents have suggested.

via Pajamas Media » Even FDR Understood: No Collective Bargaining for Public Servants.

The Solar Framework for PHP 5 is is 6 years old today. From the Subversion log:

r1 | pmjones | 2005-02-14 15:11:50 -0600 (Mon, 14 Feb 2005) | 1 line
Initial import.

How far we've come since then. :-)

[Dr. Jonathan Haidt] polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility -- and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

via Social Psychologists Detect Liberal Bias Within - NYTimes.com.

Here are the slides from my PHPBenelux 2011 talk about benchmarking. This presentation includes updates to previous benchmarks; the graph is on slide 40. The benchmarking project has moved from Google Code to Github at https://github.com/pmjones/php-framework-benchmarks.

Another unified constructor sighting in the wild: Ralph Schindler - PHP Component and Library API Design Overview.

[W]hen I think of New York city abstractly, I think of a city that doesn't work. Taxes are high, there are too many crowds, people are pushy and unfriendly, etc. Then, when I actually experience New York, I see how well it works. People are trying to give me what I want, at a fairly low price. The immigrants I run into--and there have been many over the last two days--don't seem to have come here for welfare but for opportunity to get wealthier. And people are friendly.

Why are people friendly? Partly because I love people and I'm friendly to them. But also partly because they are paid to be friendly; they do better by being friendly to customers.

via Reflections on Freedom in New York, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

... the fact that economists did not foresee the Great Recession with any precision and have failed to model accurately the recovery does not mean that economics or even macroeconomics is worthless. My claim is simply that we should recognize the limits of reason in analyzing complex systems with millions of decision-makers, numerous feedback loops, institutional features (synthetic CDOs, the repo market, the willingness of the Fed to bail out bondholders) that are difficult to model in tandem with the outcomes we care about. Finally, there are important variables that we cannot observe directly such as expectations, anxiety, confidence, overconfidence and so on.

So what is economics good for? It’s good for organizing your thinking.

via What is economics good for?.