A company that shall stay nameless (because I don’t want to get in trouble) launched a new social network type facility today. The email extolled the virtues of the numerous facilities available. The link took you to a “Closed for Maintenance” page. Brilliant.

To be fair I guess there is always a major scaling issue involved in this kind of thing. The nameless company is a big one and that mail shot will have gone hundreds of thousands of people - maybe the site got a few more hits than it could cope with.

I’m not a web developer but surely there are ways of testing that accurately simulate (is that an oxymoron?) heavy usage? Microsoft Visual Studio used to come with a “Stress” tool which no longer seems to be there. I liked it because the icon was an elephant hopping on a trampoline - a feeling we are all familiar with (as the trampoline not the elephant). This let you consume X amount of resources (memory, CPU, windows handles (yes it was a long time ago), etc) and see how well you app responded when the system was “stressed”.  Thinking about the snail like bloatware that comes as business applications these days you can see that “stress” isn’t used as part of testing anymore.

Anyway, is there not a facility to stress a web site? If not I feel a business opportunity coming on. Buy me www.rentamob.com and knock up some spoofing s/w that generates thousands of random clicks & keys from thousands of random addresses. I know a few people who ought to pay a fortune to use it…

http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/192123/infosec-08-virtual-desktop-on-a-flash-drive.html

This is brilliant. Everybody (who is anybody?)  has a PC or access to one. Using virtualization and this you could carry “your” pc on your keyring then slap it into your home desktop / laptop / friends PC / the machine in your holiday home / flat / hotel…

I used to use Tanden removable drive PC’s when I first worked from home. I just took the disk into the office & booted what looked like my PC. 

Imagine never being more than a fiddly bootup away from your PC - hot desking worldwide!