Why can’t I delete that file?

Just a really quick post because I should be working, but I found this out just today and it’s really very useful. Whenever you get a file that you can’t delete you just want to throttle windows, or the application that’s holding the file under it’s selfish control. Well, you can find out what is holding that file with a wonderful tool called Handle.

It is a command line tool but it’s very easy to use, simply type in the following and you’ll be told (in slightly verbose terms) what has a handle to what:

handle

You will get a lot of output, but you might see something like this

——————————————————————————
EXCEL.EXE pid: 3712 TRUMPET\hba

530: File (R–) C:\Documents and Settings\hba\Desktop\Book1.xls

——————————————————————————

This tells us that Excel.exe has a handle on the Book1.xls meaning we can’t do stuff to it. You can make your life easier by using the following command to save the output from Handle so you can go back over it later (the following command saves the output to C:/handle.txt).

handle > C:\handle.txt

There you go then, that’s that, not so technical so sorry about that maybe it’ll do a more in depth one later.

Scientology – my main problem

It’s been a while since I’ve written or even thought about Scientology, but just today I read a post over on My Scientology Blog, which was actually the response to some questions asked by a reader. One line really jumped out at me when I read it and it was the following:

The tools we have in Scientology don’t require belief in order to work.

My main problem with Scientology has always been that it categorizes itself as a religion and yet claims that you do not need to believe anything to be a part of it. So, how can it be a religion when we get the definition of religion from any dictionary it always contains the aspect of belief.

Religion:

1. beliefs and worship: people’s beliefs and opinions concerning the existence, nature, and worship of a deity or deities, and divine involvement in the universe and human life

2. system: an institutionalized or personal system of beliefs and practices relating to the divine

3. personal beliefs or values: a set of strongly-held beliefs, values, and attitudes that somebody lives by

From Encarta Dictionary.

If Scientology was openly a Self-Help system, a set of products for bettering yourself, or even agreed that it’s comparable to Psychology and Psychiatry I wouldn’t have any qualm with it. The rub comes with it claiming it’s a religion, by this definition Science is a religion and so pharmaceutical companies are religious entities.

I just have to sort out a set of questions I can pose to a Scientology that will make them contradict themselves.

Useful windows shortcuts

Im always looking for new Keyboard shortcuts and I found this rather special gem today in my rss feeds.

Quickly position two windows side by side in WinXP.

1. Ctrl+Shift+Esc: Opens TaskManager (I didn’t know this before, very useful shortcut instead of Alt+Ctrl+Del then ‘t’)
2. Select two or more windows that you want side by side (can use Ctrl+Space for this plus up, down).
3. Alt+W which opens the Windows menu.
4. V to Tile Vertically, H to Tile Horizontally.

Taken from The Old New Thing and I have a bunch of others that I use frequently.

Windows Key + E: Opens Explorer window so you can navigate your hard drives.

Windows Key + D: The first time it shows the desktop, the second time it restores the windows.

Windows Key + M: Minimizes all windows.

Windows Key + Shift + M: Same thing as the second time you press Windows Key + D, restores the minimized windows.

Windows Key + L: Locks the workstation instead of Ctrl+Alt+Del then k.

Windows Key + R: Opens the Run dialog, this can also be useful for navigating to a directory quickly.

Windows Key + Tab: Same thing as Alt+Tab but on the TaskBar, except you have to press space for that application to gain focus.

Alt+PrintScreen: Same thing as PrintScreen except it only copies the currently selected window.

So far this is really it without getting in to application specific shortcuts, hope this helps someone out there.

Surfing Wikipedia

I have just returned from a trip to Düsseldorf for work and I didn’t have any chance to post anything whilst there or even do much of surfing the internet. I managed to get a lot of artwork done and at some point I’ll be posting it, but I do not have time at the moment to do such things.

For the moment I’m going to go on about something that I find quite interesting, mearly because I get trapped by it quite a bit and end up wasting hours on Wikipedia. I’m being lazy so I won’t give it any kind of introduction I’ll just dive right in to my story. When due to fly back from Germany I realised that I didn’t know what Low Pressure meant in terms of weather systems and so I went about trying to find out. What I find facinating about this is that I can easily get lost in the swamp of information that is Wikipedia.

Generally when I’m Browsing Wikipedia, I will follow a link on a page if I don’t know what it is and it seems interesting enough to persue. Here’s my journey in Meterology.

Meterology – As we all know, or should know, Meterology is basically the study of weather, which is to say that it’s not just the study of when it will rain, shine, etc, but also the study of Meteorological phenomena including, but not limited to storm formation, tornados, etc. What one may not know and is that most of this all takes place in the Troposphere

Troposphere – This is the part of the atmosphere you live in extending between 4 miles (over the poles) to 12 miles (in tropical regions) above the earth. It contains over 99% of the atmosphere’s water vapor and 75% of it’s mass.  The border between this layer and the Stratosphere (which we all know of because it’s where aeroplanes fly and it’s where most of the heat gets trapped by the ozone layer) is called the Tropopause which is a temperature inversion.

Temperature Inversion –  I’ve never heard of this before and it turns out to be quite simple, though probably a lot more complex when it occurs. Inversion is just a difference from the regular way atmospheric properties change with altitude. So normally you get temperature decrease with altitude, but in some situations you get temperature increasing with altitude, as in the tropopause because in the Stratosphere temperature starts to increase with altitude. Inversion can lead to nasty pollution like smog getting trapped here and at low altitudes causing health issues, as happened in London in 1952 (I’d love to go off on a red herring about the London 1952 smog but it didn’t occur during my original search). Inversion can also surpress convection which if broken can lead to violent thunderstorms, but most interestingly Inversion can result in Freezing Rain.

Freezing Rain –  As rain falls, if it passes through air that is below freezing the raindrops become supercooled (which is when a liquid or gas goes below it’s freezing point without becoming a solid). When these supercooled raindrops impact a surface they freeze which can give trees a glazed look, cause branches to break under the weight and effect the flow of air over an aircraft.

You can see I’m incredibly off track already, but I want to finish with Warm Fronts which can be the cause of freezing rain.

Warm Front – I’ve often heard the term though I’ve never really known what it is, a warm front occurs when a body of warm air moves towards a body of cold air (potentially with a below zero temperature). The warm air doesn’t have the density to mix with the cold air and so it drifts above it, which causes the warm air to expand and cool forming clouds (high cirrus). As more air cools in this region and forms clouds they thicken into cirrostratus and altostratus and once they have reached 2,500km from the earth’s surface rain can begin to fall from the nibostratus clouds.

I don’t know the names of the clouds but there aren’t any direct links in Wikipedia and it’s at this point that I realise I still don’t know what Low Pressure really means in terms of weather and I give up for another day. Maybe I’ll find out what Low and High pressure really mean for weather one day, but for now I’m off to bed.

Obama swats a fly and the internet hates PETA

So it seems like if the president swats a fly the media look to create some kind of storm about it. You can read at the moment on many ‘reputable’ news sources that PETA is throwing a hissy fit about Obama swatting a fly. This, however, is totally incorrect. Just the tiniest bit of searching finds us at The PETA Files (I hate to make the joke but I’m sure there is someone in Peta who is a PETA File…). Here is the article that clearly states

Believe it or not, we’ve actually been contacted by multiple media outlets wanting to know PETA’s official response to the executive insect execution.

In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn’t the Buddha, he’s a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act.

The media contact PETA, PETA give a generalised statement about human beings and the media twist it to make it look like PETA are saying bad about the President. Then everyone and his sister get hold of it and scream and shout till the cows come home.

Oh well, you decide, just for the record I don’t particularly like PETA and this is one of the only times I’ll ever be on their side!

Sketch-A-Day 20090617

I really haven’t managed to do very much over the last week, but I have no now started a Flickr account which I think is better for my art than a deviant art account.

Here are some things I did for WhiteChapel.

I’m sure there are easier ways of doing this, but I don’t have time to look for them at the moment. Need to work out how to take the pictures better and/or get a camera of my own.

Sketch-A-Day 20090605

Not much time today either, had to do this quickly on the way home :(

I’m going to be away for just under a week, I’ll do a big post when I get back.

Sketch-A-Day 20090604

I didn’t have a lot of time today but I did these on the second stretch of my journey home.

Sketch-A-Day 20090603

More sketches from on the bus, this time of people on the bus.

Swoopo – A bid’s just a bet

I bumped in to a site called Swoopo a while ago, and, after lengthy conversations with a friend of mine decided it was not just a complete scam, but one that could not be cheated. I do not entirely believe this, but recently I’ve seen adverts on the London Underground for Swoopo and I’ve really been curious as to how it’s managed to stay up so long.

The basic idea is that you buy the ability to bid on items and each bid, instead of being of an amount you choose, is an increase of 10p or 1p, depending on the type of auction. You pay 50p per bid and then, when you win an item, you pay the winning price. Say for example I’ve bought a load of chances to bid and I’ve been bidding on an iPod, which I win for £20, maybe I’ve used up 200 bids if each one increases the value by 1p. That beans I’ve spent 200 * £0.5 + £20 = £120. Depending on the iPod that could be what you think is a bargain, but then if you think about all the other auctions I may have bid on and lost, say I bid on a tv with 50 bids and didn’t get it, and a car with 200 more bids but didn’t get that either. That’s adding up pretty fast, I’ve now spent a total of £245 and I’ve got an iPod.

So it’s easy to see that it’s a con, you’re going to be throwing your money away like nobodies business. Lets now look at how much these guys must make, and I’m being conservative here. My iPod sold to me for £20, lets say it started at £5 (It is more likely to start at 0). Each bid increase the price by £0.01 and I won it for the £20, so that’s £15 worth of bids each at £0.50. 15/0.01 = 1500 * 0.5 = 750. So on that auction alone they made £750 + £20 (£20 that I won the item for). If that’s not a great way to make money I don’t know what is.

However, Swoopo is in a grey area of law whereby it can be considered gambling, you are buying the right to gamble on the ending price of the item. At which point you are given the opportunity to buy it at that price. If you check the Wikipedia page for Swoopo then you can see the controversy that they are under and the call to have them under the Gambling law in the UK due to it being a Bidding fee scheme.