November 2009 – bish.co.uk

LoadRunner function – Add Five Minutes to the current time and save as a string

I needed to write a function which adds five minutes to the current time so that I could create appointment start and end times for an application used in bank branches to make appointments for customers. The function that I’ve written could be modified to add more or less time, the clever bit is making sure that it handles the last few minutes of an hour properly.

For example.
13:56 + 5 minutes = 14:01

The function handles this by converting the 13 and the 56 into integers, doing the necessary sums and then converting the results back into strings which LoadRunner can use.

When the integers are converted back to strings, single digit number are displayed correctly e.g. 01,02,03 etc. rather than 1,2,3.
The function will not work in the last five minutes of the day because I haven’t added a function to add five minutes to 23:56 to get 00:01. (If you’re running tests this late, don’t use this function).

The sample script can be downloaded from my discussion forum.
AddFiveMinutes.zip

PAL – Performance Analysis of Logs

Today I received a report from one of the sys admin types at work. The report showed performance of a server during a test which I ran last night. He used a tool called PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs).

The tool produces nice graphs, similar to Excel 2003 (it uses Microsoft Office Web Components to produce charts).

SAmple of PAL output

Google Chromium OS – first impression

I thought that I’d have a quick look at Google Chromium OS. I’m not sure that it’s living up to the hype yet.

Where did I get it?
So far it’s only available as a VMware or Sun Virtual box download. I downloaded both the VMWare .vmdk file and the Sun Virtual box .vdi files from http://gdgt.com/. I had problems with my VMWare installation so I thought I’d try it in Sun Virtual Box. I’m running Sun Virtual Box on a Windows 7 64-bit host.

First impressions
The Sun Virtual Box image doesn’t boot properly and only boots to a black screen. Because Sun Virtual Box can support VMWare images, I thought that I’d try the .vmdk file. I noticed other posts which recommend configuring the network in “bridged mode” and running Virtual Box with administrator credentials. I did both of these things and Chromium booted first time. I was presented with a simple login screen.
At this point I entered my gmail account details. The image uses a US keyboard so the @ symbol is “Shift-2”.

After login you see a very simple browser screen with your Google mail and Google calendar tabs. Other tabs can be opened and it can be used as s simple browser. At the moment, I can’t see much value in it, but couple it with some nicer fonts and the ability to save/sync your Google Docs to the local hard disk of a laptop/netbook or USB key and it could have potential.

What’s the point?

Perhaps one use could be for students to all be issued with their own OS and Docs on a USB key, all Docs are backed up centrally, but they could take their key to any machine and boot from it to get the same locked-down experience wherever they work.

Alternatively, banks could issue secure keys for online banking containing an OS that can only access the bank’s online banking site. This could greatly reduce online account fraud by only granting access to web based banking to people who have a physical device (encrypted USB key), know the password for the key as well as the online account password.