Thank god for the BCCI!

I love the BCCI and I want to give them a huge hug and lots of mushy kisses.

Hold on! you cry. They're the monopolist bastards who are responsible for ridiculous actions like pulling Sachin Tendulkar from a match at the last moment because of a slight hint of ICL in the air. Aren't they ruining the game by preventing the best players from competing with each other?

Well yes, all of the above is true. But every story needs a decent villain who gains the ascendancy for long periods, only to get their comeuppance in the final chapter.

Sadly the story of cricket is nowhere near as exciting. The headline competition takes the form of a series of international home and away tours that provide no continuous arc to a decisive final competition to select the season's champion.

Tennis learnt the lesson that a series of tour events is insufficient for fan involvement, with everyone losing interest after the US Open. So they introduced the end-of-season Masters Cup, in which the best performing players of the year fight it out for megabucks to decide that year's champion. Now, fans will follow their favourite players for the entire season to see if they make the grade - which translates into watching a lot of tennis.

The closest that cricket has is the Ashes, which captured international attention when England despatched the ultimate cricket nemesis to universal acclaim. However the following week both teams had moved on to the next tour, which Australia predictably won. England's achievement wasn't forgotten, but it was somewhat overshadowed.

Wouldn't it have been magnificent if the Ashes had been the climactic final competition of the season? England (and the world) could have rested on their laurels and enjoyed bragging rights for a year.

Of course there are difficulties with an arbitrary international season across both hemispheres, but tennis is also an international game and has managed to work out a solution.

And back to why I love the BCCI: at present they provide the only story in cricket with any degree of long-running drama. Without their battle with the plucky ICL, I would have lost interest long ago. And when the BCCI is finally brought down a peg or two, my satisfaction will be all the greater for having had to wait for it.

Error: dependency is not satisfiable: libpango1.0-0

Quoted from forums.getdropbox.com which I suspect aren't crawled so I can't bookmark

Error on downloading and double-clicking from

http://www.getdropbox.com/download?dl=packages/nautilus-dropbox_0.5.0-1_i386_ubuntu_7.10.deb

- Using Ubuntu 7.10
- libpango1.0-0 is already installed according to Synaptic Package Manager, reinstalled anyway without improvement
- I think the prereqs listed come up as installed, there are so many files I'm not sure tho

Any assistance appreciated

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi David,

I had exactly the same issue. This is what I did to resolve it:

As Michael advised, I ran
sudo dpkg -i nautilus-dropbox_0.5.0-1_i386_ubuntu_7.10.deb
(however, I actually gave it the full path to the .deb file, not just the file name).

This told me that I needed version 1.18.3 or greater of libpango1.0-0, but I only had version 1.18.2 (it took me a moment to figure out that 1.0-0 wasn't the version!).

Note: the command also left a broken installation of Dropbox, which I removed using Synaptic package manager before carrying on.

I did a bit of hunting and found this page:
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/03/10/fix-libpango-dependency-errors/

Following the instructions on this page, I installed libpango1.0-common from
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy-updates/libpango1.0-common
(following the link at the very bottom of the page, and overriding the warnings that it was later than the most recent approved version).

In the same manner, I then installed libpango1.0-0 from
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy-updates/libpango1.0-0

Once I had done this, Dropbox installed correctly, and the rest was plain sailing.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Paul.

Britain's snigger-worthy place names

CRAPSTONE, England: When ordering things by telephone, Stewart Pearce tends to take a proactive approach to the inevitable question: "What is your address?"

He lays it out straight, so there is no room for unpleasant confusion. "I say, 'It's spelled 'crap,' as in crap,"' said Pearce, 61, who has lived in Crapstone, a one-shop country village in Dartmoor, for decades.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/23/europe/journal.php