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

Phoned the agent about the online test I took the other day and he said that two out of four of us passed the online exam though the official response from the company who set it was still forthcoming.

The agent was so confident that I had done OK and was so keen to find out what I had written eventually I sent him my answer to the virtual machine question which he loved. When he had found out that I’d made a copy of all the questions and my answers he wanted the lot but if I did that I have a feeling that somehow they’d get into the wild for all and sundry to use and that’s not to my advantage.

Apparently this was the second time this company had tried recruiting someone. The first time 17 people took the test and only one passed and he then failed the interview. The 16 that failed all came from Asia and most hadn’t even finished the test, they just left a load of questions blank. The agent said that all of them had great resume’s with every bit of sexy software experience going. So why did they have such trouble with the test? Dunno.

By last Friday I still hadn’t heard any official feedback from the company and I told the agent that I thought it was fading away but no he had a real good feeling about it. Finally yesterday he phoned to say that though he’d got negative feedback from the company on the two, out of four, of us that had failed the test the company had a big software release coming up and the guy didn’t have time to give any feedback for the two of us who had passed the test and that if the agent hadn’t heard back in three to four days then assume that we hadn’t been selected. I think I can safely assume that we will not be hearing back from that lot. The poor old agent was a bit surprised by this as the company had been very keen on employing someone for the last 3 months and finally when they found someone they ran away.

I suppose maybe us two (Smartasses. Ed) may have scared them off a bit with our exam results. Whatever, in a couple of weeks they’ll be back in the market for the same people and they won’t be able to use that agency as they have already found suitable candidates. The company will have to use a different agency and hope that us two don’t apply. If I mentioned this to the agency he’d probably get a little irritated and eventually blame us for losing him business and he’d be right.

Thinking about doing some Loadrunner stuff….

Just seen on the TV that there are Afghanis queueing up in Calais waiting to sneak over to the UK in the back of a truck and then to claim political asylum. That’s all they have to do, get to the border and utter ‘I wish to claim political asylum’. Not sure if many of them can even speak English. Why can’t they do that in France?

Lord Mandelson, who is one of the leading members of the government and who has a clutch of very important sounding job names, including looking after the banks, appears to be looking after these banks very well indeed, and this guy wasn’t even voted into power. He is not an MP, but he gets to make big decisions and with no chance of being voted out because he was never voted in. He was asked the other day why are the banks, including those banks rescued by the British tax payer, still paying out huge bonuses to staff? And this guys answer was that banks had to be allowed to be banks. Jesus H, talk about letting them do what they frigging well want.

A load of MP’s have recently been caught with their fingures in the till when it was found that they’d been caught fraudulently claiming expenses. The rot stops where? Even old Gordon Brown was never voted in as Prime Minister. By some quirk of the British Constitution the Prime Minister can resign, as Tony Blair did, and his side kick, Gordon Brown just takes over. Is this right? If Blair wanted to resign then surely there should have been an election, right? Wrong, the British Constitution is known as ‘unwritten’ which very conveniently allows this nonsense to go on. Also Gordon Brown is Scottish, nothing wrong with that but I can’t see an English guy ever being allowed to run the Scottish Parliament.

If we did get a written constitution, unlike our ‘light touch’ no constitution, the legal fees to create the darn thing would probably cripple us.

We also have junk weather, video cameras spying on people everywhere, the worlds worst smoking laws and a buncha annoyed people fed up with crooked MP’s and bankers who think that their customers money in their vaults is there for them to play around with and when they’ve bought up a few billion pounds worth of toxic debt that nobody else actually wants, they get to pay themselves a percentage of the cost of that bought debt, as a bonus for successfully completing the deal. Give me strength.

I had to do an online exam prior to an interview the other day. There were ten questions including these three.

1. Write a test script for testing a memory leak in a Windows application
2. What are the pros and cons of using virtual machines in testing?
3. What are the steps for joing a new non-networked machine to a domain?.

Good questions that would seperate the men from the boys. Just hope my answers were good enough.

I downloaded and installed Python today but am having trouble getting Django installed. I’ve got a funny feeling the problem is so obvious I can’t see the brown and green tall things with leaves on from the wood.