Got your NES gun? Got your Wii Fit board? Got your Rock Band drum set? Well get this…
Activision has announced the next game in its skateboarding series, Tony Hawk Rides, complete with a plug-in skateboard peripheral. It’s tilt sensitive and includes a series of buttons on the side, though the way these will be used isn’t clear yet. The board doesn’t feature any wheels, but when you think about it, that would be tricky to pull off safely.
Of course, this isn’t strictly a fresh idea. Electronic Arts’s Skate It game worked in similar fashion on the Wii, albeit by modifying the Wii Fit balance board. The Tony Hawk game will be available on the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3.
Perhaps surprisingly the trailer for the game doesn’t even show the board until the final seconds, preferring to concentrate on footage of real-life skaters. That makes sense however: while pretty much everyone can see somebody playing Guitar Hero and identify with the air guitar player in all of us, it would be a tough call to make footage of somebody flailing about on a wheel-less board in their living room either cool or sexy.
In this new Laptop Hunters ad, Lauren and her mom are looking for a fast laptop with portability and a long battery life. As can be expected (hey, this is a MS ad, after all), their choice doesn’t end up on a Mac but on an XPS 13 laptop.
If you really think hard about it, you’ll find that the 2009 Star trek movie plot is very similar to the Star Wars plot. Captain Kirk is just like Luke Skywalker, Spock like Han Solo. Check it out:
00:30 Refresh gmail.
00:40 Refresh gmail again.
00:45 Refresh gmail again.
01:00 Twitter about how gmail is down.
01:30 Go to Google search bar on Firefox and type “gmail basic html.”
01:40 Go to google.com.
02:00 (Like an idiot) type in Google search bar “google is down.”
02:10 Cry a little.
02:30 Fire up Trillian and start complaining that I can’t read my email.
03:30 Go to Yahoo.com and say, “Hello, long time, no see.”
03:40 Find nothing helpful.
04:20 Go to search.twitter.com and on a hunch, type in #googlefail.
04:50 Thanks to a Twitterer, discover that AT&T is to blame, which is completely unsurprising.
05:00 Realize that after I finish writing this blog post, I will be unable to email the editor to tell him I’ve written it.
Okay, so this isn’t completely accurate, but the gist is, I had a sudden realization of how much Google is integrated into my minute-by-minute life. I was also reminded of Cory Doctorow’s story Scroogled, in which Google takes over the world. I wonder if this is helpful for the whole Google anti-trust investigation? Also, I wonder how much Yahoo’s traffic went up during that time.
Mock me if you will, but I suspect I’m not the only one who was suddenly paralyzed by a lack of Google (just have a look at #googlefail). The email thing was definitely a problem. Whether it was the fault of Google or AT&T doesn’t really matter. Maybe they’re trying to remind us how much we need them?
Our friends at GFI have just released a free backup solution for home users. It’s not a stripped-down application, but a complete, fully-featured backup software solution.
In addition to regular backup functionality, GFI Backup Home Edition allows people to sync up data with a remote location, like an FTP server. The application is wizard-driven, so novices won’t have problems using it.
And as far as I’m concerned, the best thing about the software is how it compresses data. Unlike many backup solutions, GFI Backup uses the widely popular ZIP standard. What this means for you is that your backups can be easily recovered anywhere, at any time, as ZIP files are natively supported by all modern OS. And if you’re worried about security, the application supports 256-bit AES encryption.
In you’re interested in trying out GFI’s new free backup solution, the application is available for download right here.
The term “cloud computing” has entered that phase of the buzzword life-cycle in which everyone is talking about it, few people are doing anything with it, and most people’s understanding of what it means is, at best, cloudy (sorry).
Those who do understand cloud computing usually think of massively parallel servers used to scale up to meet user demand. But Randy Hayes of CapCal had the opposite idea: why not use the cloud to simulate user demand instead of satisfying it?
CapCal’s Web Performance Testing product spawns Linux instances in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to perform load testing of a web site by simulating any number of simultaneous users. The tester first records a script of whatever use-case scenario they want to test. The script can include normal pauses for “think time” so that it truly represents how a user would interact with the site, and can be recorded from the desktop without having to edit the script at all. The user then feeds that script into CapCal and specifies how many simultaneous users to simulate. CapCal starts up the requisite number of Linux instances in the cloud (about one agent for every 100 simulated users), which gradually ramp up to pour the HTTP requests onto the specified site. Here are some more details on the architecture.
A controller process monitors the agents and gathers data in real time. This includes all sorts of performance metrics on each and every request including load time, bandwidth required, and any errors encountered. A summary report classifies the percentage of response times that fall within various categories of acceptability. The detailed data can be downloaded and fed into Excel so you can do whatever analysis you please on the numbers.
The cloud-based architecture is fairly new, but CapCal has been doing this type of load testing using a distributed network since 2000. Amazon’s EC2 allows them to grow easily to any number of agents at minimal cost.
Pricing for the service is yet to be determined, but Randy told me that he’s thinking of simply adding on to what Amazon charges for the compute time. Of course, depending on the load you select, you might have bandwidth costs of your own to consider. We also discussed the idea of subscription-based pricing for sites that would like to conduct this sort of testing as part of their regular cycle of development-QA-release.
Speaking of the development cycle, CapCal also offers a free service called Agile Performance Testing (APT), which is a scaled-down version of their Web Performance Testing product. It runs 20 user simulations from a single agent on your local machine, so (hopefully) you can’t really stretch your site to the breaking point — but you can still gather the performance data to compare what your latest change did to the overall page load experience. Agile developers could use this in conjunction with unit tests to verify that nothing gets seriously broken with each iteration. Randy showed me a pretty impressive demo of this product today. He also demonstrated starting up agents in Amazon EC2, but we didn’t do any live testing using the cloud-based agents. I guess they’re still filing off the rough edges on that product.
To launch the service onto the public stage, CapCal is looking for a site that is willing to undergo testing at the 1 million simultaneous user level. Randy says he’s done the research, and nobody has ever load-tested a site at that capacity before, so he hopes to score a line item in the Guinness Book of World Records. I don’t know about you, but after enduring a million simultaneous user test, I’d be ready for a Guinness of a different sort. Do you think your site could handle 1 million simultaneous users?
Randy has generously given [GAS] permission to give away ten free “find your limits” site tests! So the first ten people who leave a comment requesting this freebie, have their own domain, and do not run their site on a free or shared hosting platform (VPS’s and dedicated servers are fine), will get the opportunity to bring their own server to its knees. Please note that if your site includes impression-based advertising (including Google Adsense) you may want to disable the ads for the test, in order to avoid violating their Terms of Service.
It’s that time again… If you have been reading [GaS], or any other blogs for that matter, you know that there will soon be a new version of the Microsoft operating system.
Now are you curious if your faithful machine can handle Windows Seven?
You are? Then we have a little application for you!
The common cry among those concerned about violence in videogames and sex on the Internet seems to be: think of the children! Kids might be growing up fast these days, but that doesn’t mean they’re growing up bad; in fact, a lot of them are growing up to be geeks. Now with wifi-enabled cribs, babies can get a head start on their computer skill set. Plus with the mac vs. pc war still raging, we’ve got to get ’em young.
The term “cloud computing” has entered that phase of the buzzword life-cycle in which everyone is talking about it, few people are doing anything with it, and most people’s understanding of what it means is, at best, cloudy (sorry).
To launch the service onto the public stage, CapCal is looking for a site that is willing to undergo testing at the 
It’s that time again… If you have been reading [GaS], or any other blogs for that matter, you know that there will soon be a new version of the Microsoft operating system.
