BT have asked for state handouts in much the same vein as some other ISPs have. They say the BBC should carry some of the cost incurred by iPlayer.
This smells of cartel-like behaviour, with Tiscali and Carphone Warehouse pan-handling for tax-payers money with exactly the same fatuous arguments. The BBC already carries most of the cost by producing iPlayer and its content. That these ISPs have sold that which they cannot afford to give is not the BBC's (or old Missus Jones who has a TV but no internet) fault or problem: that's those ISPs' poor business models of offering unlimited bandwidth for too low a price.
The ISPs should bear the cost of their own mistakes - make a loss, change their business model, go bust, renegotiate their terms with their customers, stop advertising unlimited services that are limited. They should not be subsidised for failure.
To ignore the contents of a directory in Subversion, do this:
cd $directory_in_question svn propset svn:ignore '*' . svn ci -m "Ignoring anything in $directory_in_question"
This ignores files and subdirectories in the directory and ignores any new added nodes to the directory after the commit. The quotes around the * character ensure this is what happens.
I was ignorant of what the ongoing summary meant when running tests via TAP::Harness. Thanks to a colleague for explaining it to me:
===( 3626;332 1810/1810 0/? )======================================
First pair: total tests run;
Second pair: first test, 1810
Third pair: second test, 0 tests run, no plan
I'm running TAP::Harness with two jobs so two tests in parallel, hence two \d+/\d+ reports.
So MPs think their job is worth more than the salary on offer? In which case, raise the salary, get a different job, or put up with it. Do not create a tax-free supplement office wherein the staff deliberately set out to steal money from the public.
I happen to think MPs should be paid a good salary - 5 times the national average - and have no expenses whatsoever. That would mean covering second homes, constituency offices, travel and so fourth out of the c. £120k salary. But if enough people in Britain are willing to change their vote to prevent that happening then the shareholders have spoken.
Had I instructed our payroll officer to steal from my employer in order to pay me tax-free made-up expenses I'd expect both of us to be charged for our crimes. I want to know who told the Fees Office that stealing from the public was their main purpose, and I want fraud charges brought against them and the Fees Office staff that colluded in this.
It isn't about the money, really. It's about double standards and thievery. Maybe we collectively want monkeys running the country. Maybe politicians could argue successfully for having a slightly more clever primate in charge. However, if you want a pay rise then ask the boss, don't just take it from the petty cash.
I had a strange problem: If I started Lighty with basic auth and a static FastCGI server (running a Catalyst application) I could get to the site first time, but subsequent attempts (from a different browser or after restarting the same browser) timed out.
Fixed this by upgrading from lighty 1.4.19 to 1.4.22. Looks like it was a race condition to me, but I don't know for sure. As I upgraded by manually installing (as Debian's apt package is still at 1.4.19) I had to edit /etc/init.d/lighttpd to point at the new binary in /usr/local/sbin/ after installation.
