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Diveboard holidays : back to the Ocean !

por Ksso el 08 de julio de 2011

Finally after 6 months of intense coding, and months of frustration seeing the cool dives our users are uploading from Brazil, Italy, Egypt and many other cool places, we finally get to add new dives to share on Diveboard (that is if we find some network)!My diving gear is checked and ready to fly to Thailand in Koh Samui for more underwater pictures, and Pascal will be heading to southern France to pass his FFESSM/N2 grade (somewhere between AOW and Rescue Diver).Blogging will be slower and updates are being kept secret - ready to roll when we're back!

Fish too need to decompress

por Ksso el 07 de julio de 2011

At 4am (I was jetlagged), I ended up watching a very interesting short movie showing how fish are being fished and brought to those big city aquariums all over the planet. The interesting bit was when the fisherman showed something I actually never thought about : Fish need to decompress !!I never realized that although they do not breath gaz, they still extract the oxygen from the water they filter through their branchiae... thus there is gaz in their blood, thus some get fixated within their tissues.The video was showing a jack that was laying horizontal at the surface of the water, unable to keep its buoyancy, the abdomen totally inflated. The Jack had been fished in deeper water and...

Diveboard Feature update: homepage, dive types, notifications

por Ksso el 28 de junio de 2011

There have been a lot of updates over the past three weeks since our last "Feature update" blog post. I'll try and cover the major ones:Newly redesigned homepage: We were feeling the initial release of the homepage was gorgeous but not efficient in telling in a glimpse about Diveboard's mission and objectives. Also our visitors tended to believe they needed to register to enter the site, which is wrong since we have so much content available publicly. Richard did a brilliant job in creating a new version of the homepage which highlight the core features of Diveboard and hopefully will draw visitors into starting digging inside Diveboard.Dive types: Many users have asked for the ability to...

Scuba in Disneyworld

por Ksso el 28 de junio de 2011

I'm a big kid and I love Disneyworld. I was dazzled when last fall I visited the Nemo Pavilion in Epcot. Amazing species in a beautifully crafted giant aquarium. And now I found the ultimate reason to justify flying back there : you can now actually go for a dive in this aquarium ! Epcot DiveQuest is a 40 mins scuba dive managed by NAUI instructors in this huge 5.7-million-gallon saltwater tank and over 6,000 sea creatures—including sea turtles, angelfish, dolphins, eagle rays and sharks. 175$ but totally worth it.All Guests must be SCUBA certified and at least 10 years of age to participate. Guests ages 10 to 14 require a SCUBA-certified adult to accompany them.The experience lasts 3...

Underwater magical encounters: when your chest starts pounding

por Ksso el 25 de junio de 2011

This is a must-see video : National Geographic's Brian Skerry describes the exhiliration of an up-close encounter with a curious, 45-foot-long right whale. For any diver, this kind of feeling are something we all experienced at some level. I remember my first encounter with a shark - my chest was pounding so hard I could not help but swim towards them to snap a closer shot. But I just can't imagine how exciting this encounter must have been and how much experience and self control you must need to get a right shot in those conditions.

Fish round-up: the Lionfish

por Ksso el 13 de junio de 2011

Lionfish (Pterois) are beautful - and dangerous. Originating from the Indo-Pacific Ocean, they have been introduced by mistake in the Atlantic in mid-90s and have become invasive along the East Coast of the US. Lionfishes measure 6.2 to 42.4 cm with typical adults measuring 38 cm and weighing an average of 480 g.While beautiful, his tentacles ar poisonous making it a hazard to fishermen and divers. Pterois venom produced negative inotropic and chronotropic effects when tested in both frog and clam hearts and has a depressing effect on rabbit blood pressure. These results are thought to be due to nitric oxide release. In humans, Pterois venom can cause systemic effects such as vomiting,...

Diveboard Feature updates : Performance enhancements and bugfixes

por Ksso el 08 de junio de 2011

We pushed a set of updates during the last few days here are the main ones worth mentioning :

Performance update : Limited dependencies to the FB Graph API. If FB Graph API is unavailable and your account is using FB connect and your session is still active, you will not even notice it's down

UDCF export : UDCF export was reported as being a wee bit buggy, it's now fixed and improved (and tested successfully with MacDive and DivingLog)

Video Embeds on Facebook Wall posts : Now if you have youtube videos on your logbook, and it's your choice of featured content, when posting to Facebook the video will be shown as an embed playable from your wall. ...

Kickstarter projects to watch

por Ksso el 08 de junio de 2011

Kickstarter is a platform to raise money for your project. Actually it's not really technicaly about raising money but rather about pre-selling the idea and getting enough cash to finance its execution. Kickstarter has helped finance and launch many amazing projects, sometimes geeky, sometimes arty... but today I wanted to showcase two projects related to things that matter to scuba divers.Living Sea Sculpture: contemporary art as coral refuge

Protei, Open Hardware Oil Spill Cleaning Sailing Robot

Both projects have been successfully founded, and we'll watch closely as they progress ! Hopefully we'll find more of such initiatives on Kickstarter.

Service disrupted : FB Graph API down

por Ksso el 06 de junio de 2011

Since about 12am CET, the FB Graph API which we rely on to authenticate Diveboard's users is massively disrupted as shown in the graph below. The graph is updated on Facebook Developer's blog page.

As a consequence almost no-one can login at the moment, until the API gets back to normal. I say almost no-one since there's a secret ugly page on diveboard to try out the login/password feature, and some users are actually using it. It's on occasions like this that we're happy to have cut the dependency with Facebook on that key element.UPDATE 1pm: After one hour downtime, API is back up at 1pm CET (lunch break over ?) - API is still VERY SLOW - fingers crossed !UPDATE 2pm: FB API is feeling...

Diveboard feature updates : Ready for non-fb-connect, Iterative permissions, Bulk dive manager

por Ksso el 03 de junio de 2011

Finally ! We survived a complete rewrite of the login system. As you may have read previously, we assumed that diveboarders will be OK with the FB-login-only approach... apparently we were wrong since many of you actually were complaining about that.

Ready for non-fb-connect users & Iterative permissions

So we heard you and we spent a lot of time and effort to enable multiple login mechanisms on Diveboard. This came at a cost since FB Connect was doing a lot of the job, and we were given some capabilities such as you accessing your FB pictures/videos or posting to your wall were granted... and now we have to assume you may not even have a FB account ! So now we can handle those cases...