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ChrisInEdmonton

42 karma · joined December 2, 2011

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ChrisInEdmonton··on Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
I used PagerDuty for more than a decade at my previous job. I didn't care much for the UI. But you know why PagerDuty does so well? Basically bulletproof reliability. 99% uptime won't cut it. 99.9% uptime won't cut it. You need to be as close as possible to 100% uptime, no excuses. Pagerduty isn't perfect, but it was one of the most reliable services we ever used.

I sincerely wish you luck with allquiet. I just want to make very sure you are aware why people still pay for Pagerduty. To compete, you need to be looking at 99.99% uptime or better (ideally 99.999%, 5 minutes of downtime a year) where 'uptime' is defined as the ability to exercise the entire notification stack. The moment someone's site has an outage and you aren't able to deliver the notification, you lose the customer and everyone they talk to.

I also worry about in-app notifications, but that's well-covered by everyone else's comments.

Pagerduty is vulnerable. Their UI is garbage. But you need to have bullet-proof uptime to take them down. It's a tough challenge and I wish you luck!

ChrisInEdmonton··on We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
I disagree on Airtable. Their homepage currently says "Part spreadsheet, part database, and entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way."

I'm a software developer. I have no idea what they are selling, based on that. Is this some sort of souped up Google Sheets competitor? If so, what does it do better? Is this a team workflow management tool? If so, why bring up spreadsheets and databases? I suppose some teams may try to organise their workflow using spreadsheets, but this far into the 21st century, most people use tools like Jira or Github Issues or Monday.com or one of fifty other tools. Is this a software development tool? If so, errr, what?

I literally haven't the slightest idea, after reading their homepage, what problem this is trying to solve, what solution it is offering, and what the target market is. Am I a potential customer? I haven't the slightest idea. Can this help solve any problem I have? Maybe, but the homepage goes out of its way to refuse to answer this question.

Airtable has even targeted ads at me. It's not like I've only spent two minutes looking at their site. I still haven't the faintest clue what they do, let alone why they are better than competing alternatives.

ChrisInEdmonton··on The Resuts – Pwn2Own 2017 Day Three
I was at CanSecWest, though I wasn't in the room while these vulnerabilities were being exploited. The claim I heard was that the qemu toolset, compared to the VMWare toolkit, are less functional but also less vulnerable. Still, the qemu device drivers were the source of a significant number of vulnerabilities. Indeed, there was a talk, "Dig into the qemu security and gain 50+ CVE in one year". That talk was, frankly, rather scary.

So, it's not just VMWare specifically.

ChrisInEdmonton··on Is ZFS a suitable replacement for other Linux filesystems?
Ah ha! Thanks. Data deduplication. Well, yeah, that makes sense to me. Thank you very much for clearing that up.
ChrisInEdmonton··on Is ZFS a suitable replacement for other Linux filesystems?
I have heard that ZFS (at least, ZFS on Linux) requires about 1 GB of memory for every 1 TB of storage. Is this an accurate statement? That's certainly a critical flaw for many use cases, though completely irrelevant for many others. If accurate, what's behind this requirement?
ChrisInEdmonton··on The Low Down on Recovering Deleted Files
This article does not mention how TRIM on SSDs comes in to play.
ChrisInEdmonton··on Association between muscular strength and mortality in men (2008) [pdf]
I'm quite capable of running a half-marathon and decided to try the HIITs. They were terrible for me. My knees couldn't handle the added stress, and I had to give up HIIT and go back to 'regular' training. I'll certainly grant that it was an interesting training technique, though, and I can well see that it would be good for most people.
ChrisInEdmonton··on Rails 3.2.13 - Performance regressions and major bugs
Yeah, tvongaza is correct. Admittedly, it's not a _big_ issue, and perhaps I'm going about things the wrong way. If you could tell me a better way of getting this issue fixed, I'd love to hear it. The only other time I tried, it took more than two years. Luckily, it was pretty easy to monkey-patch our own code to deal with this, once it broke our live site.
ChrisInEdmonton··on Rails 3.2.13 - Performance regressions and major bugs
There's been a few people suggesting that, if you are bitten by a bug, you fix it and submit a pull request. That's a good idea. I did exactly this to a regression introduced in 3.2.9, complete with a unit test and a pull request against 3-2-stable and one against master. It took two months to get anyone to look at it, and while one of the two pull requests has a thumbs-up, it's still not been merged. Admittedly, this isn't a security issue as far as I can see, but still.
ChrisInEdmonton··on MSDN Blogs Have an Interesting View of Time
I don't get it. You've linked to page 28,842 of the Latest Blog Posts index. It shows articles more than ten years old. So what? What am I missing?