I was recently performance testing ATM service management software for a "major banking client". We had to simulate a 20000 ATM load on the system.



Left to right: Me and Steve

What do you think then?

Despite being colour blind, Steve Hedley's far more graphically capable than I am!

Cheers for creating the image Steve.

I've setup Izabella's website using WordPress.

We've got phones and digital cameras which support videos, so it's time to start publishing Vobcasts (Video Podcasts). Initially I went for YouTube, but friends complained they couldn't see content from YouTube because it was blocked by their company.

So instead I found PodPress:
http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/
... which allows me to upload videos (in the same way as pictures) and include them in blog posts.

The PodPress plugin for WordPress was easy to install and has good integration with online services such as Apples iTunes. The only gripe I have is that the interface (whilst writing blog entries) is a bit clunky.... 1. Upload the video (through the normal WordPress interfaces).... 2. Fill in PodPress details about the video... 3. Manually cut and paste [display_podcast] into the post text.

After several security vulnrabilites were highlighed in the previous release of SimplePHPBlog I had to disable functionality. Finally today I decided to upgrade to 0.5.1.

It's great to have the choice of 5 themes along with a really nice menu to navigate to old posts.

The upgrade was fairly plain sailing, and I just copied over the images, content and config folders to the new install.

I noticed a few errors popping up in /var/log/https/error.log:
[Thu Dec 20 12:17:15 2007] [error] [client 192.168.0.4] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function utf8_encode() in /var/www/html/new/scripts/sb_formatting.php on line 32, referer: http://localhost:8000/new/index.php

After a bit of googling, this would appear to be a Mandriva related problem, the version of PHP 5 that came with my Mandriva 2007.1 install doesn't have support for the utf8_encode() function.

Usint URPMI I did the following as root:
urpmi php-xml

(I used this page to configure urpmi for my version of Mandriva)

Followed by a restart of Apache:
service httpd restart

All working fine now.

I just setup Google Reader for the first time and added a load of website which I read regularly.

It's an excellent tool for reading feeds from website, you can also share articles too. Here's my shared articles:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/151 ... 9131968357

Along with a feed for the shared articles too:
http://www.google.com/reader/public/ato ... /broadcast