Just paid my bi-annual Edinburgh parking ticket online.

They were kind enough to provide me with these photos of the big car:



At least they gave me the opportunity to complete a questionnaire about the "service" provided. I can't see that anyone will be singing the praises of the private company that Edinburgh council employs to do it's profit making dirty work.... Perhaps you want to complete their online survey?....
http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/internet/Tr ... ets_online

Personally I think the level of enforcement is forcing small businesses to close down. I was popping into the ESPC office on a Sunday to pick up a property schedule, my mistake was assuming that bus stops were okay to park in on a Sunday... a £30 fine tells me I was wrong to make that assumption.

I've just added a new static page "My Twitter" link:
static.php?page=twitter

I've still not made my mind up on twitter - but the 160 character blog posts are just right!

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/programs/ab.html

"NAME: ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool"

I've now had a bit of time to look into some of the new features in HP LoadRunner 9.0

The SLA window is very useful - you can fill in "thresholds" - i.e. your clients performance requirements.

Let's say that under peak load they want a page (transaction) to return in less than 20 seconds, all you have to do is set up an SLA that only kicks in when the number of VUsers equals maximum and has a threshold of 20 seconds.

Here's how you Analyse the SLA:

.... it's not in Analysis by default!

Click here to view a quick report out of Analysis - the 0/Zero threshold means "I don't care about this transaction when there are less than 5 VUsers".

Forget using SLAs if you have any dynamic transaction names, e.g. "lr_start_transaction(lr_eval_string("{MapSelected}_LocateXY"));"..... I found that as a result couldn't use SLAs on one project.
The interface to adding/editing SLA simply doesn't cope with dynamic transaction names.

If you get it right - it will provide a pretty good "traffic lights" indication of how a run went. Also you don't have to trace lines on graphs to determine if requirements (SLAs) have been breached.

Just randomly stumbled across this site when I was looking for the codes to control my TV from my SKY+ remote:
http://www.satcure.co.uk/tech/digicode.htm

Discovered that my old sky (not Sky+) remote will control my new Sky+ box with a bit of tweaking. So that's been dusted off and will do for the kitchen.

Also got the Sky remote to switch the TV channel to 5 automatically - this is where I have the Sky box tuned to. I thought the AV button was missing from the Sky remotes, but it turns out the "Help" button does AV when the remote is in TV mode.