Just booked myself on a Loadrunner course for the next two weekends which I’m quite looking forward to.

To get a bit up to speed thought I’d see if I could try it out first at home. I had a look at the HP site and found a demo version that I could download once I had registered and the register page wasn’t working. Next I got a copy from a newsgroup and wrote the image to DVD. Had a look at the files and it was version 9.1 which doesn’t work on Vista. I could put it on the XP machine but it’s a bit slow.

Had a another go at registering at the HP site so that I could download the demo version for 9.5 but again still couldn’t register. Instead I started an XP clone in VMware on Vista and installed it onto that. Well, I started and immediately a window was displayed saying how it needed .NET 3.0 and all kinds of other stuff and at the same time Windows Update popped up that that wanted to download a load of stuff. Downloaded the Windows updates and all the stuff Loadrunner wanted and eventually LR was installed.

Will be interesting to see how an XP VM is going to run when I’ve created a LR script and I hit this blog with 10,000 virtual users. Bet the web hosting company make contact if I run a script like that for a couple of days.

Reading ‘Trollope’ by Victoria Glendinning, which was one of the Books of the Year a few years ago but it’s not a patch on ‘Anthony Trollope’ by James Pope Hennessy. Also read recently: ‘A Week In December’ by Sebastian Faulks, which is terrific and Paul Theroux’s ‘Ghost Train to the Eastern Star’, where he repeats the journey from Europe to Asia and back through Russia he took 30 years ago and generated ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’. Excellent

The iPhone is to get 3G in May 2008, apparently. Now we’re talking. Betcha they have battery problems with that.

I saw that Oprah Winfrey has just made Ken Follett’s The Pillars Of The Earth her book of the month. That’s a big deal as the publishers printed 621,000 more copies for expected sales. Now that’s what I call clout.

This is a story about cathederal builders in 12th Century England. Oprah also said that she had stopped reading it at about page 800 as she was enjoying reading it so much she didn’t want to get to the end. I know what she means, I read it several years ago and it was ridiculous, once you start it’s almost impossible to put down. There are no peaks and valleys at the end and beginning of the chapters, it just keeps rolling along (’Why does that remind me of the Mississippi? Ed).

Probably one of the best books I have ever read. I think what makes it so good is that it’s written in modern day English. If it was written in old English then that obviously would have made it harder to read. They may have spoken old English then but they were probably still talking the same way that we do now. As Follett has eputedly said, just because they lived 800 years ago that doesn’t make them any less inteligent than us, just that they hadn’t discovered or invented things yet. It’s odd when you read it as you sympathise with the characters 100% but you are constantly being reminded of what they didn’t have or know yet. For instance they ate with knves and spoons as forks hadn’t been invented. Then you think that Shakespeare was 300 years in the future. The Normans had invaded the previous century. As for Henry VIII, he wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye.

A recommended book.