Technology – Page 7

Why all the outages?

Last night I was “playing around” with a new product that we have under development at TrustIV. The application tests the relative performance of different websites and ranks them. A couple of the sites that it was monitoring seemed to be experiencing problems.

Showcase cinemas was offline.

So was “LoveFilm”. (I particularly like their error page referring to Gremlins).

As well as this asda.com, coventry building society and ToysRus were all experiencing outages.
I confirmed this with my own browser but I found it odd that they were all offline.

Perhaps they all sit on the same cloud server….who knows. I’m going to keep monitoring these sites and I’ll report back here and on the TrustIV blog when I have more news.

Quadcopter timelapse

My brother-in-law took this set of photographs from a remote controlled quadcopter when he visited our house at Christmas. The quadcopter ascended to 150 feet or so over the fields near Market Street and took a set of still images which I spliced together to produce a “timelapse” effect.

As the quadcopter takes off the camera is facing West towards Lumb Wood on Holcombe Hill. The copter then rotates to the left until it is facing East, at this point many of the houses on Market Street and Heycrofts View become visible. After this the camera is pointed towards Edenfield Recreation Ground, “the rec”. The copter rotates again after this and shows a view towards Scout Moor. After this the copter returns to its take off point in the garden.
This still image shows a view of Market Street and Heycrofts View.