ISPs’ poor business models

Posted by robbiebow on 17 June, 2009 under geek, politics | Be the First to Comment

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.

SVN – Ignore contents of a directory

Posted by robbiebow on under geek | Read the First Comment

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.

TAP::Harness summary

Posted by robbiebow on 16 June, 2009 under geek, perl | Be the First to Comment

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; elapse time in seconds

Second pair: first test, 1810 of 1810 run

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.