"Al3x's rules for computing happiness," Alex Payne

Via Marco Arment, an incredibly useful and relatively short list of rules to make you happy about using your computer.

Well, let's back up: I interpret Alex Payne's rules as mostly being applicable to tech-savvy people. Why? It boils down to this one rule of what software to use:

Use a plain text editor that you know well. Not a word processor, a plain text editor.

Now, this one makes total sense to me. I compose these little blatherings as plain text files on my own computer in vi (or, to be precise, vim) before copying and pasting them into Blogger's text fields. It might strike you as a suboptimal work flow, but it's serviceable and it allows me to keep my own personal archive of my posts. Considering that a blog in its essentials is HTML, and HTML is plain text data, using vi to create my posts makes perfect sense to me.

But then, I know the difference between "plain text" and whatever MS Word does.

I haven't used a Windows system in years so I don't know what ships with Windows as the default plain-text editor. I very much doubt that default text "editor" is either easy to use or powerful, though, because Microsoft has a huge vested interest in steering people toward Word. As far as most Windows users are concerned, Word is the default text editor. They have no idea that Word doesn't save "plain text."

So telling Windows users to use a plain text editor is meaningless. That tells me Payne wasn't thinking about ordinary users when he put his list of rules together.

Having said all that -- boy, are Payne's rules sensible. They're two and a half years old, and they're still good advice.

Pakistan's military is on shaky ground

In the wake of the bin Laden killing, an opinion piece in a Kurachi-based publication, dawn.com, challenges Pakistan's people to confront the elephant in the room.

Today is the time to hold the military accountable for their failures and their actions and bring some direction to the state of affairs.

Pakistan's military either did not know bin Laden was hunkered down in a big house mere feet from major military intallations, or did know and kept mum. Neither case covers the military in glory.

Worse, Pakistan's military either knew the U.S. was planning its raid and held back its forces to avoid a dangerous confrontation between itself and its patron, or did not know about the raid in advance and took an unconscionable amount of time to respond. Considering how damaging the delay has been to Pakistan's reputation, the obvious face-saving explanation would be collaboration with the U.S. And yet:

It is stupid, nay unimaginable, that our forces collaborated extensively and do not want to take credit for it. They would not risk inviting the wrath of the international media that they have called upon themselves today.

So as things stand, Pakistan's military has lost a lot of prestige no matter where the truth lies. For that reason, claims the writer, the Pakistani people will have no better opportunity to challenge the military's hitherto unquestioned supremacy in the country's politics.

The scope of action called for is daunting, considering the outsized role the military plays.

Summon the Army Chief. Summon the bureaucrats. Summon the experts. Summon everybody. Make them testify. Ask them the tough questions. Make the report, if not the proceedings, public.

What should they ask them? I cannot imagine that anybody would even want to ask the unimaginable (did we protect him?). It can only be an intelligence failure inquiry.

I don't quite know whether this means the writer has ruled out the possibility that elements of the government knowingly sheltered bin Laden, i.e., the idea is too absurd to be countenanced, or simply is acknowledging the impossibility of getting a straight answer to the question. (The piece is a little rough in spots, grammatically speaking.) It's also not clear to me whether the writer considers calling the military to account the responsibility of elected officials, or of the people themselves.

What comes through loud and clear is the desire for change exposed by this episode -- the same desire for change that the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and other countries have expressed, to varying degrees, in the last couple of months. And Pakistan's military has lost the respect of its people, the most critical factor in keeping the country peaceful and united under military rule.

An interesting question that this piece doesn't raise (because it's focused on domestic Pakistani concerns) is whether the U.S. may have done itself more harm than good by so undermining the reputation of Pakistan's military. If the writer's unhappiness with the military is true of the population as a whole, we could see a clash between the military and civilians that will result in significant civilian casualties. Even worse, the military could splinter and throw the country into civil war. In that case, in addition to the terrible loss of life on both sides, the world would have to be concerned about the fate of Pakistan's nuclear ordnance. Would killing bin Laden have been worth such terrible consequences? We can only hope we don't have to decide.

Minnesota GOP Gaiman hater

I'm a fan of writer Neil Gaiman. I'd like to think, though, that I would have been outraged by Minnesota House Majority Leader Matt Dean's hateful remarks directed at Gaiman even if I had never heard of the celebrated author of DC/Vertigo's Sandman.

Dean also singled out a $45,000 payment of Legacy money that was made last year to science fiction writer Neil Gaiman for a four-hour speaking appearance. Dean said that Gaiman, "who I hate," was a "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota."

The Onion has a bit more information on what appears to be the tempest in the tea (Party) pot.

It's pathetic that the Tea Partiers have such a persecution complex when their irrational determination to find bias where none exists is responsible for the tone of remarks like Dean's. And it's even more pathetic for mental midgets like Dean to endorse the thoughtless pillorying carried out by the Republican Party's irrational base.

How to antagonize your colleagues

• Be passive-aggressive even as you protest you're just trying to be reasonable.
• Protest that you're listening even as you ignore what others are saying.
• Complain woefully about all the work you're doing, implying that others aren't carrying their load.
• Play the martyr.
• Be self-aggrandizing.
• Talk so much and so often that you exhaust the ability of anyone else to have a cogent discussion.

(Yes, this is based on a real person.)

Don't make bad meetings worse

I've learned in a couple of decades of attending meetings of all kinds that sometimes you have to restrain yourself from speaking. If, that is, you want the meeting to end.

Meetings involving engineers can be aggravating: engineers tend to be less well socialized, less adept at reading and responding to subtle behavioral cues, than normal people. Yet I will choose a meeting of a hundred poorly socialized engineers over one with a dozen community activists any day. The engineers, by training and temperament, are inclined to get to the damned point. They also recognize facts when they see them, and respond to rational arguments.

Community activists, on the other hand, are often people with more zeal than talent. (If they could get paid for their zealousness, they'd be getting paid instead of being community activists.) The fact that they get excited by something the rest of the community does not, means that the activists are a little odd. Sometimes, they're more than a little odd: they're flat-out nuts.

You'd think that the lofty goal toward which they're donating their time would keep them unified. You'd be wrong. The contention usually comes down to incompatible visions of how to achieve the goal. In more troubled cases, "the" goal is sheerest illusion: two or more factions are pursuing different ends without realizing it.

But even if they can reach consensus on a goal, they can't stop being odd, or nuts. And that's what kills meetings.

It only takes one person with a bone he can't stop picking to bring an otherwise rational discussion to a halt. The fussiness or crankiness or belligerence or outright malice he brings to the table infects everyone else, and before you know it, a verbal brawl has broken out. Even if the brawl is avoided, the discussion still simmers along but gets nowhere.

A strong leader can keep a meeting from rat-holing. However, a strong leader is anathema to a meeting of community activists. (Given the angular personalities involved, perhaps it's instinctive wisdom for the group to deny such power to any one member.) The most that can be tolerated is a moderator to preserve what Wodehouse called "the decencies of debate." I think it would be better for a verbal brawl to break out, because at least such a shouting match might tire the participants enough to give up the battle in a reasonable amount of time. Preserving the decencies of debate just allows the debate to go on, and on, and on, and on.

Perhaps the worst problem afflicting these people is a profound inability to analyze their own behavior. They rail at the group's dysfunction, but have not the slightest idea that they're major contributors to it. It's not unexpected -- if they knew how odd or nutty they were, they wouldn't be odd or nutty -- but it is unfortunate.

If you found yourself in such a gathering, your first impulse would be to fix it. You'd want to make people see how fruitless their rat-holing was. You'd want to explain just why the "debate" is pointless.

And you'd make things worse. You'd be throwing oil on a fire.

The only way to deal with these people is to let them have their say, then move on as quickly as possible. Don't make things worse by trying to argue with them. Just stay quiet, and keep reminding yourself that you're foregoing the pleasure of telling them how foolish (or selfish, or otherwise deficient) they are for the arguably greater pleasure of getting the damned meeting over sooner.

On Osama's death

I don't have much to say about bin Laden's death. The best encapsulation of my feelings is a quote from Tim Carmody, writing for Kottke:

I hope we can exorcise this man, his damage, and the damage he helped incite us to, from our lives. I have to hope that we have enough strength left in our democracy to do that.

I'm as relieved as the next U.S. citizen that he's dead. But I'm not treating this as an excuse to party in the streets, as the crowds gathered last night at Ground Zero and outside the White House did.

The "war on terror" goes on -- except that, to borrow from The Wire:

Det. Ellis Carver: You can't even call this shit a war.
Det. Thomas Hauk: Why not?
Det. Ellis Carver: Wars end.

It ain't a war -- and it ain't over.

Now get back to your lives.

That helium balloon is valuable

It's not really news: I had heard this a year or more ago. This, though, is the first article to which I can link that explains why helium is a scarce commodity, and why it will only grow scarcer and more valuable as time passes.

Unlike its flammable elemental sibling hydrogen, helium can't be produced through relatively simple chemical processes on Earth. The only way I know of to produce it, in fact, is through hydrogen fusion, a process which on Earth is currently only possible through uncontrolled reactions, e.g., the H-bomb. And although helium isn't consumed through any of its uses, i.e., it's not transformed into something else through combustion or chemical reactions, it's nevertheless exceedingly difficult to recycle. Unlike most of the gases comprising our atmosphere, helium is light enough literally to float away from the planet.