bish.co.uk – Page 7 – Musings of a performance tester

HPE software and Micro Focus merger

In September many people were surprised at the news that HPE was set to spin-off their software business including the former HP Operations Management products and former Mercury products.

I wrote a brief article decribing my thoughts about this at the time.

Since this announcement, more information has been released by HPE describing their reasoning behind this proposed change to their business as well as what it means for their customers. The Vivit user group in Chicago recently held a webinar hosted by Mihai Grigorescu which allowed HPE to describe the proposed changes. Tony Sumpster and Genefa Murphy from HPE then took questions from Vivit members. If you’re a current HPE Software customer I’d heartily recommend watching this webinar.


Tony Sumpster Senior Vice President IT Operations Management Hewlett Packard Enterprise	Genefa Murphy Vice PresidentProduct & Program Marketing Application Delivery Management Hewlett Packard Enterprise

The webinar is available on the Vivit website at this URL:
(Free Vivit membership required)
http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/members/group_content_view.asp?group=80108&id=620706

Alternatively, you can view the webinar by clicking the link below
(Bright Talk membership required)
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9649/229733

Website videos black / dark for first few seconds – FIXED

This has been annoying me for ages… When I say ages, I mean 6 months or more. When I start to watch a video in Chrome on a website like YouTube or BBC News, the first few seconds of the video are dark and pixellated. I’ve tried new video drivers and other setting changes but none have worked until now.

This first image shows what a video looks like when it starts to run in Chrome.

When I realised that the same videos played well in Internet Explorer, Edge and Firefox, I decided that it had to be one of the Chrome settings. After some trial and error, I discovered this flag:
chrome://flags/#disable-accelerated-video-decode .

I disabled this which means that Chrome wasn’t trying to use hardware acceleration on my graphics card. This fixed my problem.

After disabling hardware acceleration, my videos are clear, right from the first second of replay – a great improvement.

BackBlaze Review

I’ve been toying with the idea of backing my PC up to “the cloud” for some time now. I’ve used Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive and other cloud based storage before, but what I really want/need is a proper backup.

By that I mean something that I don’t need to think about and just does it’s job. I’m not looking for the ability to sync data across devices (I can use Google / Dropbox / OneDrive for that. All I need is reliable (ideally off-site) backup.

A few years ago, I read the BackBlaze blog, “PetaBytes on a budget” and based on this, even toyed with the idea of setting up a similar service in the UK. This remained a pipe dream after I found that they were already planning to launch a UK service themselves.

Fast forward to now, I installed BackBlaze last week and subscribed to their “backup all you want” for $50 per year. Even with the pound at the current low, that’s less than £40 per year!

Although it took about 8 days to do the initial backup over fibre broadband, now it happily runs as a background service and I don’t have to think about it any more. I just wish that I’d done this sooner.

If I need to restore a file or folder, I can just download it or I can order a HDD or USB stick with my entire backup on it directly from BackBlaze.