Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Plagiarism
Plagiarism

I’ve heard this phrase before, but it’s never applied to me until now. This afternoon I was searching for a snippet of LoadRunner information when I came across a LoadRunner blog that I hadn’t seen before. I read a couple of articles when one in particular caught my eye. The website http://easyloadrunner.blogspot.co.uk by Raviteja Gorentla had one article in particular that interested me.

Article 1
The article “New Release of LoadRunner 12 version” describes in detail how the author met HP at the Discover conference in Barcelona and worked with them on the beta evaluation before it was released. This all sounded very familiar, so I looked at my own article, “First Look at LoadRunner 12” on the Trust IV blog. The text was identical. The plagiarist hadn’t even had the decency to cite the original author (me) or include a link to the Trust IV website.

Article 2
I did a quick trawl of the plagiarist’s website and found numerous other articles, some of which seemed familiar. For example “How to use JavaScript in your HP LoadRunner scripts” is a straight copy of Malcolm Isaac’s article from the HP LoadRunner and Performance Center blog.

Article 3
I looked a little further and the article “Sequential Random Unique Each iteration, Each occurrence in Load Runner” was taken from Sindu Bindu’s website and the article entitled “LOADRUNNER VUGEN PARAMETERIZATION” (http://www.sindubindu.com/2012/04/loadrunner-vugen-parameterization.html – Link no longer available). Even the images were taken from the original article because the screenshots showed a distinctive purple colour on the task bar.

Article 4
The next page that I looked at was “Action files in LoadRunner”, a very short article, describing the purpose of the three commonly used sections in a LoadRunner script. This also looked as if it had been copied from Sindu Bindu’s website. “Action files in Loadrunner” (http://www.sindubindu.com/2012/03/action-files-in-loadrunner.html – Link no longer available).  This same content was also duplicated on three separate scribd pages.

So far all the articles that I’d seen had been taken from other people’s websites. No original source or author was ever cited, but Raviteja had thoughtfully put a copyright statement at the bottom of his pages to protect ‘his’ content from people like him.

Sadly Raviteja’s efforts were in vain. Three other “copy cats” appeared to have reproduced his content on their scribd pages. The “Action Files in LoadRunner” document is also reproduced in:

So now you know why it’s so hard to “Google” for the correct answer to a performance testing problem. Unscrupulous testers are ripping off other people’s content and passing it off as their own. Next time you hire a big offshore provider, try to make sure that you don’t get Ravita, Janede, Sai or Ilaaaannnn working for you. I’m not sure that they know what they’re doing.

What’s my IP address?

Posilan is the hosting company that Pixel8 use for the Trust IV blog and website.
They have a handy (and ad-free) IP checker on their website:

The first one is for conventional browsers.
http://www.posilan.com/ip

The second one is useful in case you don’t have a complex browser.
http://www.posilan.com/ipplain.php

For example in UNIX you could type:

wget http://www.posilan.com/ipplain.php


this downloads a small file to your machine containing your IP address.

V. Handy 🙂

TFL’s new website coping well during #tubestrike

I recently read an article in ComputerWeekly describing how TFL had redesigned their website using HTML5 to optimise performance across multiple device types. I was interested to see how the new site was handling the likely increase in traffic due to the tube strike.

Prior to the HTML5 re-write the last major redevelopment of this site had been in 2007, well before the  proliferation of mobile devices, now used daily to check for travel updates or plan journeys. 75% of Londoners visit the TFL website regularly and there are 8 million unique visitors per month.

I was in London earlier this week so I,  along with millions of other commuters, wanted to keep up to date with the news of the tube strike. I, like many others, turned to my smartphone for answers. The site performed well on my Android phone, so I wondered whether the increase in traffic had caused any performance degradation.

At Trust IV we have developed an in-house application to test the performance of websites, we monitor performance for several hundred sites, each of which is categorised into a relevant business sector. TFL was already being monitored in our “travel” category. I was impressed to see that the website was the 3rd fastest travel site monitored today with a page response time of <1.2 seconds. The site developers should be pleased with themselves.

TFL_WPT report

 

Although occasional spikes in response times were observed (which is common when monitoring in this way); on the whole the site remained responsive throughout the day. Average response times appear no slower today than they were last week (the chart below shows response times in milliseconds).

TFL_day

If only more of the sites that I visit regularly performed as well as this.

Get in touch for more information about our “Test The Market” monitoring application and how it can give you insights into your own website performance and see how your performance compares with your competitors.

 

See more articles like this, and download the response time report at:
http://blog.trustiv.co.uk/2014/02/tfls-new-website-coping-well