404 not found - error while updating using aptitude
How to install software or upgrade from an old unsupported release?
Compiler warning: null reference exception I have the following code in Visual Studio 2005.      Dim OutFile As System.IO.StreamWriter     Try         OutFile = New System.IO.StreamWriter(Filename)        // Do stuff with OutFile     Catch Ex As Exception        // Handle Exception     Finally        If OutFile IsNot Nothing Then OutFile.Close()     End Try   But VS2005 brings up the warning for the line "If OutFile IsNot.." that      Variable 'OutFile' is used before it has been assigned a value. A null reference exception could result at runtime.   Is there some way of removing this warning by subtly altering the code or is there just a better way of doing what I'm trying to do?  Thanks  Rob Earlier today, I was suspended from chat due to an inappropriate message (I totally deserved it, but that's not the point). I looked at my phone, and this is all that it told me:    ...which confused me because chat was still moving as normal. I didn't realize that I had been suspended until I checked on my computer to see what the heck was going on.  To me, "This room is read-only" sounds like some sort of database lockup or something related specifically to the room, not the user. It doesn't give any feedback to indicate that the room will be "read-only" for 30 minutes, and doesn't mention that all other rooms are also "read-only". Even a message saying just "You have been suspended from chat" would be more helpful. Making pen and ink corrections on a UK visa form? Something's been bugging me about SO for a while now, that is the inaccuracy of "length of time" strings.  The best example I can give at the moment is .  If you look at the length of time he's been registered, it says 1 year.  He joined the site September 2008, which is only 3 months off two years.  It's the same with answers - you can give an answer 50 seconds before anyone else, but at certain times page views will show both as "5 minutes ago" or whatever.  That's not quite as bad, but with answers being sorted "randomly by votes" by default you could lose out on votes or being marked as the correct answer to the slower answer even if they're both the same.  There's probably a better method amongst these, IMO:   "Vulgar fraction" unicode characters     Member for 1½ years   answered 5¼ minutes ago asked 3⅓ hours ago  Different units   Member for 21 months (at least it's better than "1 year") Answered 306 seconds ago (ugly, I know) Asked 64 minutes ago (also ugly)  Combining units   Member for 1 year 9 months (fits easily on the profile screen) Answered 5 minutes 6 seconds ago (probably too long) Asked 3 hours 20 minutes ago (also long)  Rounding up   I personally prefer option 1, unicode fraction characters.  "Member for 21 months" is pretty good too because it's easy to quickly work out.  "Asked 452 seconds" ago is horrible though.  EDIT: I'm completely aware of the timestamp hover because I am forced into using it so much. It's a great feature, but it's not really in your face so not everyone knows about it. I still think there's a better "glancing" solution than having to hover over the time string. Rigorously proving equal tension on both ends There is always one point in introductory mechanics that has been continuously bothering me ever since I had taken my freshman physics course - Why does a massless rope have its tension equal on both ends?  I have been searching for a good explanation on various textbooks at different levels, but none of them provided me a satisfactory explanation. They either   State directly "we assume the string is massless and the pulley has no friction, therefore the tension must be the same throughout the string" without further any elaboration and continue the calculation, Claim without any reasons that "whenever the rope and the pulley are massless and frictionless, the tension will be the same on both sides", or Explain using a lot of hand-waving arguments regarding infinite acceleration, non-zero moment of inertia, etc. , in one line or two.   Although those hand-waving arguments of type $(3)$ do sound quite reasonable to me and will convince me for a while every time I review them. But after a while, I will start feeling not well about this whole tension concept again.  Therefore, I am looking for a rigorous (in the physicist's sense) proof of exactly why and when do the tension in rope will be uniform, and hopefully from that I can clean up all of my conceptual difficulties. How can I get this 'Version: 0.1.0 - 94" value from the  tag in selenium webdriver? How can I get this Version: 0.1.0 - 94 value from the &lt;div&gt; tag in selenium webdriver? and here is my code:  &lt;div _ngcontent-qbk-c3="" style="text-align: center;"&gt;Version: 0.1.0 - 94&lt;/div&gt; Buying from Play store using a credit card with foreign billing address Is it possible to use a credit card with a foreign billing address to buy items from a local Play store? I have a Visa credit card from a German bank with a billing address in Germany registered in my Google Wallet. I have successfully used my Wallet to pay for online purchases from several online service providers in different foreign currencies so I am sure the credit card is correctly registered in my Wallet account. However, while physically located in the UK, I cannot complete any purchase from the UK Play store. At the point when I need to select my preferred payment method from my Wallet account, it shows my registered credit card greyed out with the text "Unsupported Payment method" next to it. How do I eliminate reflection on glass? When I take a picture through a window, I often see a reflection on the glass. I have noticed that this occurs mostly when it is dark or overcast outside or it is especially bright on my side of the glass. How can I stop this? YA book about a young powerful female caster attending a school that trains in magical arts and duels I read a young adult novel around the turn of the century. This story features a young female protagonist that is very naturally gifted in magic. She is attending a  to learn mastery and control over her gifts.  A lot of her school revolves around magic dueling. The participants are taught to extend their inner aura like a second magical skin, possibly referred to as creating a shield, or . The user can increase the strength of the shield by focusing harder on it, but doing so means you have less ability to be offensive. The amount of energy needed to create a shield was half the energy a foe would need to focus at you to break it.  Ex: Mage A and B are equally matched. Mage A focuses half his power into a shield. Mage B would then need to focus 100% of his power to break A’s shield.  Another aspect I remember is that when dueling, a school master would extend a personal shield on to one of the combatants as a sort of secondary shield that goes underneath the combatants. When one mage broke the others mages personal shield, the school masters shield protects the losers life from harm, and the breaker of the shield is declared the winner.  I distinctly remember one match in which the protagonist is having a duel with another strong student. She creates a wind storm around herself that picks up the sand from the arena floor and makes her impossible to see and thus makes it hard for her opponent to focus on her shield to break it. She then lashes out at her opponent with incredibly powerful strikes with the final strike being so hard it shatters the opponents shield and then breaks the school masters shield as well and stops just shy of killing her dueling partner.  Any assistance on this one? I think my daughter would love to read it. Mass Uninstalling Just been working on a new laptop today (Acer) and it was pre-installed with all sorts of crapware. Mostly games and "backup utilities" and McAfee. I had to manually uninstall about 30 apps via Vista's Programs and Features  So it got me wondering is there any way of mass uninstalling or queuing an app to be uninstalled? Through Vista/XP you need to wait for Install Shield or whatever to close before beginning to uninstall the next app. Took way more time than it should have.  Just another one of those Windows annoyances! Any help appreciated as I often need to do this when I come across a slow machine that's just been clogged with a bunch of useless apps How can I run Maniac Mansion through ScummVM? Day of the Tentacle Remastered Edition includes Maniac Mansion as a .  The game appears to be exactly the same as the old DOS release (albeit, the enhanced version).  If possible, how can I run this game through ScummVM?  Pointing ScummVM at my installed game doesn't work.  What do I need to do to play this version of Maniac Mansion? Recent movie involving dimensions and time travel/displacement It's a (relatively) recent movie about a kid whose scientist father is missing or presumed dead.  The kid experiences strange situations (e.g., books from a case fall off).  In the end, it was the father the one that was throwing those books to draw the attention of the kid.  Does anyone know the name of this film? May I use Google Fonts for creating a logo with commercial purposes? I want to create a logo for a contest, the winner will be paid and the winning logo will be the institutional logo of an academic entity, so I need a font which can be used freely or at a cheap cost for commercial purposes.  I see that Google Fonts are delivered as "free fonts" for websites:  May I use them freely for graphic design products (a logo in particular) as well? How to trigger a warning when a certain function is called (not compiled)? It's possible to do a array of Matrix in Matlab? Google Chrome: Version 32.0.1700.107 m  This happens when displaying the profile and clicking on the number of visited days/consecutive.  . How to disable "time travel" entirely? Every time I open a question I get this oh so funny 90s feel with scrollers and whatnots. In every question I need to click it off. The button seems to only work for the specific page I load; loading a different page shows the theme again.  Is this an attempt to keep people from using the site for a few days or how do I tell you "please never ever do anything like this if you want me to keep contributing here"? Yes I have no sense of humor if this is an attempt at that.  How do I turn off "time travel" (also known as "back to the future") mode off permanently, on all questions, and preferably network-wide? How to check who owns the Slack's workspace? I'd like to check who owns (or at least some kind of public profile page) some workspace based on its subdomain (e.g. xyz.slack.com).  Is it possible? This is a  about how to handle email sent from your server being misclassified as spam.  For additional information you may find these similar questions helpful:                    Sometimes I want to send newsletters to my customers. The problem is, that some of the emails get caught as spam messages. Mostly by Outlook at the client (even in my own Outlook 2007).  Now I want to know what should be done to create "good" emails. I know about reverse lookup etc., but (for example), what about a unsubscribe link with an unique ID?  Does that increase a spam rating? How are constraint forces represented in Lagrangian mechanics?