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Diveboard: post-mortem of a couple hell server days
by Ksso on May 21st, 2013
You may have noticed it, last week on both monday and wednesday around midnight we experienced two outages on the main Diveboard server. Both lasted for 12 hours each. Here's a little post-mortem about why this happened and why it won't happen again.
Before we dive into the deep of Diveboard, we need to consider a few facts:
Diveboard has 0.5 M unique visitors a month, half originating from North America
Pascal spent a lot of time lately removing all bottlenecks in the code making the page generation really fast and efficient, as a consequence our main server (a 2-year old quad core) was loaded at barely 30% from our production environment (and we even used to run the testing environment on the same server)
Of course, all the data in Diveboard is backed up multiple times a day, most of the content ends up on the Google Storage cloud and on a backup server, database data is dumped daily and hourly and stored on multiple locations. Hence there was a max 1hr of data that could ...
ShoreBuddy - The Inception
by Scuba Steve Colorado on May 20th, 2013
THE HOW AND WHY OF SHOREBUDDY'S INVENTION...
I was recently asked about the inception of ShoreBuddy™. What prompted me to come up with it and what is the story behind the project? Well here it is in a nutshell.
The year is 2002 and in preparation for a trip to Australia (loved it! - just sayin') I was desperately trying to get as many dives in as possible. My intention was to improve my skills to get the most I could out of my dives in Cairns.
...and here we go!
Please visit the UnderPressure Blog for the complete story on ShoreBuddy™ and how it came to be!
I can barely feel my lips
by Phil on April 29th, 2013
I've been diving for around 4 years and I've logged hundreds of dives. I work part time as a Divemaster in Iowa. Iowa diving does not offer what people would consider 'warm water diving.' Warm water in the Midwest means around 70 degrees Fahrenheit maximum! On average when certifying students the water is between 45 and 70 degrees which requires two piece 7mm suits most of the season (I can only imagine the pain of those divers up north in Canada!)While a two piece 7mm suit will keep you fairly warm, one thing that is hard to keep warm is your lips. I was unaware of any solution to keeping my lips warm outside of a full face mask; which would require additional training as well as quite a load of money. The "Cold Water Lip Shield" was first brought to my attention by Diveboarder in Chief Alexander Casassovici. He had used one while getting his ice diving certification and recommended it. While looking around I found that a lot of Aqualung regulators come with them standard which is...
Subsurface 2013 Underwater Photo Contest
by Elche on April 18th, 2013
The divingiscool.com scuba diving magazine and its Hungarian
partner site, divecenter.hu organize picture of the month contests since 2007
and shootout competitions since 2009. During the last few years the
photographers sent hundreds of images to the picture of the month contests
and this traditional online contest is still going on with different subjects
every month. There is a video snapshot contest since 2010 as well. They felt
maybe they are able to organize a different kind of competition, an annual one
with modified rules and valuable prizes. After a few months of work the two
websites proudly announce a new international photo contest with 4200 USD in
prizes for all underwater photographers.
There are 3 categories in the Subsurface 2013: Open Macro,
Open Wide Angle and Compact. You can submit your photos until the 30 April 2013
deadline and the registration is free. The international jury decide the
winners of the categories but there’ll be a public vote as well. Certainly...
Support Coralbot on Kickstarter
by Ksso on April 17th, 2013
We first heard about the Coralbot about a year ago. Imagined by a team of scientists from the Heriot-Watt university, the projects leverages on research on swarm intelligence to provide an innovative solution to restore the function of reefs, both shallow and deep across the globe. They just launched a kickstarter project to raise 107 000$ to build prototypes to demonstrate their approach.
Coral-bots are a team of robots that intelligently navigate across a damaged coral reef, transplanting pieces of healthy corals along the way. The big job of developing and testing the robots at sea has already been done. All that remains is to embed the robots with computer vision to “see” healthy bits of coral, and configure appropriate manipulator arms for each robot to pick up and put down the pieces in the right spots. Kickstarter funds will let us purchase and assemble this kit, and allow us to conduct our first live demonstration of the robot team on a coral reef in a public aquarium. Th...
Quick start for dive professionals on Diveboard
by Ksso on April 11th, 2013
At Diveboard we spent a lot of time recently thinking about the professional divers and how we could help them be more present online and on Diveboard.
There have been pro pages on Diveboard for a while, but to be fair they were just a slightly tuned version of the usual diver logbook - and while quite a lot of dive shops were listed there we had the feeling it wasn't up to what we had in mind.
Hence here come the new Pro pages ! While still under heavy work - a lot is already there for you dive professionals to try out.
The starter version starts with only two basic elements:
Profile: featuring all the location info we have. Those are coming from the diver's inputs in their logbooks as they list the dive shops they've been diving with.
Review: listing all the public dives done with a shop as well as the reviews left by users, hence giving plenty insights as to what to expect when heading there.
But with a very little effort, your dive shop page can become AWESOME. I...
Testing the Cetatek Aquabionic Warp 1 fins
by Ksso on March 17th, 2013
Cetatek was kind enough to send me a pair for their first product: the Aquabionic Warp 1.Yesterday I took them on a test drive with a buch of friends. Since my place is nowhere near a real see we had to make do with the local 20m/65ft deep pit so I couldn't try them out against a real current - but still got enough material to give some feedback on this piece of tech.
I've had the traditional Volo Race fins for years - a pretty popular model amongst divers since they're pretty cheap and yet going a bit beyond the cheap finns thing with some work done on impulse restitution which I found fairly efficient. But those finns have know to be very fragile and indeed you can tell the weak spots of the structure in a glimpse - but hey - it's a 90$ pair of finn!
The Warp 1 plays in a very different category. Firstly it's the most expensive pair of finns I've ever used with a listed price on Cetatek's online store at 225$.
The Cetatek team worked hard at finding out a more efficient method fo...
The Blue Dragon, a unique kind of nudibranch
by Pascal on March 5th, 2013
While checking out a few of the very educative quiz from DAN, I stumbled on a very special kind of nudibranch : the Glaucus Atlanticus.
Picture by: Wang, TC, WJ, Chen & Robert - Some rights reserved
Contrary to its name, it can be found worldwide in temperate and tropical waters, with many reports in Australia, South Africa or Carribean Sea.
On top of the very cute look of this slug, it differs from other nudibranch by its favorite location : free floating on the surface. Unlike many other of its cousins, it does not lurch on the bottom feeding on benthic animals. It prefers floating on the surface of water, using bubbles stored in its stomach to stay on top. Its form and colors act as camouflage against species swimming below.
There it feeds on hydrozoans like the portuguese man o'war, to which stinging cells it is immune. Actually, not only is it immune to this poison, but it also stores and concentrates it on its skin to protect itself. This makes this small cutie (up...
A few Transparent underwater species
by Ksso on February 22nd, 2013
As I was browsing weird underwater species, I realized there are quite a few that are weirder than others or at least that were showing a particular feature : being transparent.
I picked 3 very different weird ones, but I'm sure there are more ! (don't hesitate to leave your hints in comments I'd love to complete the list). I didn't mention the obvious jellyfishes - the very ones every diver has encountered (and tried to avoid most of the time) .
1. The Barreleye (Macropinna microstoma)
The Barreley lives in pretty deep places (~2,000m, 6,000ft) and has some incredible eyes able to rotate upwards to look through its transparent skull (actually fluid-filled)
2. The Crocodile icefish (Chionodraco hamatus)
The Crocodile icefish roams the cold waters of Antartica and can be found in shallow waters and down to 400m / 1,300ft. They have no hemoglobin and oxygen is actually breathed through its skin.
3. Transparent Amphipod
With about 10 species in the Phronima genus, th...
Picture of a Giant Manta giving birth
by Ksso on February 8th, 2013
Photography: ©2013 Martin Ureta. All Rights Reserved.
Film Maker Martin Ureta is a really lucky diver. As he was in Maldives for a holiday he ended up taking the first ever picture of a giant oceanic manta ray (Manta birostris) giving birth! Mantas aren't mammals but their reproduction is very cingular as during copulation the male will fertilize the female's eggs which will be staying in the female's body for about 12 months. Eggs will hatch internally usually ending with giving birth to one pup.... which is wat the picture captured !
As you may know little is known about the life of those giant animals and their protection is of upmost importance as explained in depth on lifeoftheworlds.com by Angelina Cecchetto .
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Diveboard: Post Mortem Of A Couple Hell Server Days
by Ksso on May 21st, 2013
Shore Buddy The Inception
by Scuba Steve Colorado on May 20th, 2013
I Can Barely Feel My Lips
by Phil on April 29th, 2013
Subsurface 2013 Underwater Photo Contest
by Elche on April 18th, 2013
Support Coralbot On Kickstarter
by Ksso on April 17th, 2013
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