Financial Crisis Explained

There is a quite clear and thorough explanation on the Freakonomics blog about the recent large bankruptcies and bailouts. Read it here. This article pieces together what the Federal Reserve did and why it did it, as well as why all these monolithic financial and insurance corporations are running out of capital.

Reigning in Some of the iTunes Bloat

I use iTunes almost strictly for listening to podcasts, even though I own a Zune, because it lets me group my podcasts into smart playlists (even if it's an inelegant solution). So, I have no use for the iPodService that starts up every time you run iTunes. In fact, even if you disable that service from within services.msc, iTunes will reset its status to Manual and re-open the service. That's very annoying and smacks of malware behavior. So, the easiest way to disable this in Windows XP is:

1. Press WindowsKey + R to get to the Run menu.
2. Type services.msc and hit Enter.
3. In the main pane of the services window, scroll down until you find iPodService.
4. Double-click that, and click the Stop button.
5. Then change the Startup type to Disabled.
6. Close services.msc.
7. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\iPod\bin\
8. Change the extension of iPodService.exe to something else. I changed mine to iPodService.dontrun. If you don't see an extension, you'll have to enable it within Windows Folder Settings.
9. Create a blank text file and name it iPodService.exe.

If you were to just delete iPodService, iTunes would only re-install it the next time it is run. In this case, iTunes sees that the file it wants to run is there, doesn't reset the service state, and probably tries to run the fake executable. I'm not to sure on that last one, but the end result is you don't get iPodService running in the background. All bets are off on the next update.

You can perform this same trick on other iTunes processes that you don't need. For example, I also disable iTunesHelper (located in the iTunes install directory). If you like to re-organize your music collection in a program other than iTunes, you should leave this running as it keeps the music data in sync. If you do all of your adjustments within iTunes, then this process is useless. I can't guarantee that replacing any other process won't trigger a re-install.

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How Nuclear Power (Probably) Works

I saw this comment posted on the Freakonomics Blog by user AaronS (a frequent commenter), and I thought it served as a good explanation for how a nuclear power plant operates. Granted, I don't know much about nuclear power, but this sounds right. Here's the explanation (almost) verbatim:

A lot of folks see the world “nuclear” and get a bit concerned. That’s understandable. But some years ago, my cousin, who is an electrical engineer for TVA, took me on a tour and made it very simple. Here it is the elementary explanation (and the best one I understand):

A nuclear plant is really a huge steam engine. It’s sole purpose is to produce steam that will turn a massive turbine (or turbines), and which will, in turn, produce electricity.

To produce the steam, atomic material is submerged in a large tank of water. (This tank, by the way, along with all the pipes connected to it, is completely self-enclosed. This water never runs into the river or the ground, but stays in the pipe.) This atomic material, being active, has a lot of atoms/electrons flying around. They bump into each other at an increasing rate of speed, generating heat. Of course, being submerged in water, this heats up the water, generating steam.

Before I go further, lest someone think it might all get out of hand, to prevent overheating (a meltdown), each nuclear plant has, in the tank of water, “rods” of material that serve as a kind of magnet to these very active atoms. When those rods are lowered, those atoms stop flying around, stopping the heating process. And when it’s time to produce more steam, the rods are lifted as needed.

OK, so all that steam runs along these self-enclosed pipes and turn the turbine, producing electricity. But that water has to then be cooled. What happens is there is a parallel pipe of cold water that runs alongside the pipe filled with the steam. This allows the heat to transfer to the cooler water, thus turning the steam back into water for further use in the nuclear process.

This cool water (now hot), was likely drawn from a river and is not radioactive. But it is still hot. What to do with it? Well, it is pumped up to those huge cooling towers.

Inside the cooling tower, about halfway down, is a “field” of dimpled rectangular plates (about 4 inches by 12 inches, if memory serves). This non-radioactive hot water is sprayed on those dimpled plates, the dimples serving to provide more surface area for cooling purposes. As the water trickles down the plate, it is exposed to the cool air, and cools down. But it does produce the steam/condensation that you may see rising from these cooling towers. As big as they are, you think that is where the real work is being done, but it’s just cooling off water.

I know that won’t cut it with some of you engineers, but that’s the very simple version of how nuclear energy works…and perhaps shows that we should not be so fearful about it as we have sometimes been led to be.

— Posted by AaronS

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Get Rid of the Windows Update Restart Nag

Windows is relentless with its nagging to restart your computer after you download a few updates. So, if you are being bothered by the nag dialog this very moment:

1. Bring up your Run window ( Start > Run... or WindowsKey + R ).
2. Type cmd and hit OK to bring up the Command prompt.
   
3. Type sc stop wuauserv and hit the Enter key.

EDIT: You can apparently just skip step two and type sc stop wuauserv directly into the Run window prompt.

The Windows Update pop-up will immediately go away. Hooray!


Now, to keep that nag dialog less naggy next time, you have to edit your Group Policy. This only seems to be an option for Windows XP Professional users.

1. Bring up your Run window ( Start > Run... or WindowsKey + R ).
2. Type gpedit.msc and hit OK.
3. In the Group Policy editor, navigate to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update.
4. Make sure the right pane is on the Standard tab.
5. Double-click the entry for Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.
6. Select the Enabled radio button and change the value of restart (minutes) to 1440. This is the maximum value you can use and will delay the next restart nag for 24 hours. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way of keeping the restart notification from coming up ever again.
7. While you're in the Group Policy editor, set No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations to Enabled. That should keep your computer from auto-rebooting while you're away.

After making the Group Policy changes, you may need to reboot.

I actually stole these suggestions from here and here.

How to Find Which Program is Accessing a File

Occasionally, I will attempt to delete a file or folder, and I get an error stating:

Error Deleting File or Folder
Cannot remove folder xxxxxx: It is being used by another person or program.
Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.

Now, the easy solution is to just close down all of your open programs in the hope that one of them is accessing that file or folder. That is, it's easy in that it doesn't require much thinking to do. But I hate shutting down all of my open programs because one file is being obstinate. Even after going through the trouble of killing all open programs, there could still be a system process accessing that file. This file is connected to a process as a handle. You don't want to kill that process--just close the handle. And once all handles connected to your undeletable file are closed, then the file can be trashed.

There are two programs you can use for this:

• Unlocker - This program is primarily a shell extension, which means that it shows up in your right-click menu. Just right-click the file you want to delete, choose "Unlocker" from the context menu, and a dialog will pop up listing all the handles connected to that file. Click the Unlock All button and that file is ready for death. If you want a simple and elegant program that does just this one thing, install Unlocker (the download link is right below the PayPal Donate button).
  
• Process Explorer - There are so many things this program is useful for, but the goal here is to kill a few handles. Open up Process Explorer and click the Find menu and select Find Handle or DLL... (or just press CTRL + F as a shortcut) . Type the name of the file or folder in the search field, hit Search and you'll get a list of all file handles that connect to that file. If you don't supply an entire path, it will try to find the handle based on a string search. Click on a handle and in the main Process Explorer window, bottom pane, that handle will be selected. Now you can either right-click the handle selected in the main window and choose Close Handle or you can go to the Handle menu and choose Close Handle. It's slight less efficient than Unlocker at this task, but it can give you just about any bit of information you could possibly want to know about any running process. (The download link is at the top of the far-right column.)

Use either of these programs and you won't have to interrupt your work flow to delete the undeletable.