The biggest freshwater fish caught by a woman record in the UK has been smashed. This old man was safely released after having his weight verified by the lake bailiff.
Author: mark
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Muckleshoot Indian Tribe mass harvesting salmon out of Lake Sammamish
I rode my bike down to this little singletrack that leads to Issaquah creek mouth today on South Lake Sammamish and it’s nuts down there right now. The Muckleshoot tribe is doing their yearly salmon harvest. The whole south of Lake Sammamish is covered in gill nets they’re using to harvest the salmon – courtesy of the 1974 Boldt decision which gives them rights to half the salmon catch every year.
I chatted to one of the tribe members and they’re allowed to gill net from today until Friday (3 days). I have a bit of a mental block about gill netting because it’s highly illegal to do it in the ocean where I come from – but for different reasons. When a gill net breaks free from its anchor it becomes a death trap until it biodegrades. Fish swim into it, they die and become bait that attract more fish which swim into the net and the cycle continues for years. River and lake gill nets are different assuming they’re all recovered by their owners.
I did some research into how safe it is to eat the salmon from Lake Sammamish and it’s perfectly safe. According to the WA dept of Health you can eat more than 16 meals per month and still be OK – based on toxicology levels for PCB, DDT and Mercury. Here’s an extract:
Sockeye salmon had the lowest levels for all contaminants tested in this
study. All calculated meal limits were above EPA’s unrestricted level of 16 meals per month for
a 60 kg person (Appendix C, Table C9). Consumption rates were not calculated for chlordane
because of the low detection frequency (no samples were above the detection limit).In case you’re curious, Safeway seems to be buying most of the salmon from the Muckleshoot tribe and you should see a few specials on Salmon at Safeway in the next couple of weeks. I’m probably not going to support them – there’s just something wrong about seeing the whole of Issaquah Creek mouth and the south lake covered in wall to wall gill nets.
I think I need to re-think my fish eating policy in general. I think the same thing is happening in the Ocean – I just don’t see it first hand.
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Bring it!
This is taken about 50 miles from where I grew up in South Africa. It’s from one of my favorite documentaries of all time “Air Jaws”.
We have big fish back home.
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Feedjit on Techcrunch
Feedjit made Techcrunch this evening and Michael has installed both our widgets on the blog entry, complete with his own personal color scheme “Arring Town”. We also rolled out a new version that adds a pretty cool (if I say so myself) ajax widget customization interface. Now you can choose your own colors – a much requested feature – and you can adjust the traffic feed width.
If you have any questions, bug reports or comments, please don’t hesitate to email us at support@feedjit.com or just leave a comment here.
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Otis Taylor – Blues God
I watched Shooter last night. Besides a few badly done slow-motion-macho-manly-walking scenes, it’s a pretty good flick. The titles at the end had this awesome blues song that I had to Google. It’s called ‘Nasty Letter’ by Otis Taylor. The man has an interesting history. He left music in the 70’s to become an antique dealer and then picked it up again in the 90’s. I bought his album ‘Truth is not Fiction’ on iTunes and it’s full of incredible gritty meaty blues.
If you’re looking for music to sip a peat and seaweed 10 year old Laphroaig single malt whisky to, then this is it.
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FEEDJIT New version released
I’ve released a new version of FEEDJIT with the following improvements:
- A real-time traffic feed updated every second on the home page
- We’ve upgraded to a 64 bit platform that is handling a lot of traffic. Watch the real-time feed to see some of the traffic we process. However, we are currently only at 2% capacity, so if you have a high traffic blog, BRING IT!! We can handle well over 1000 hits per second.
- We now show landing pages in your real-time traffic feed so you can see where your users arrive on your site in real-time.
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Calling all Faith No More fans…
Here’s a clip my bro pointed me at from Mike Patton’s new project Peeping Tom. If you have a very wide range in musical tastes (from BeeGees to Tool) then you’re going to love this:
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"Man vs Wild" vs Les Stroud's Survivorman
Les Stroud Rocks. There’s no question about it. Survivorman is one of the best shows ever made. Les Stroud really went into the wild with his own camera gear and filmed himself for a week without any food or water – repeatedly.
The reason it didn’t make it big is because it wasn’t fake enough.
Which is why a bullshit show called ‘Man vs Wild’ is now bigger than survivorman. James Hong (hotornot.com founder) has a little video on his blog exposing “Man vs Wild”.
The last time I saw Les, he was on Larry King chatting about a new nature movie someone else is launching. Someone needs to give the guy the credit he’s due and put some serious money behind him to do another show – and this time put it on a real network – like the Vs Channel.
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Scaling from 0 to 40 hits per second in 3 days
The thing about running a widget business is that you serve as many web server requests as all your users websites, combined. And if one of your users get’s Dugg or Slashdotted, you get Slashdotted too.
After I launched FEEDJIT on Thursday (5 days ago) the traffic started picking up Friday and by Saturday morning my server was groaning under the strain. Some of the highest traffic blogs were Japanese (there are more Japanese bloggers than English) and by mid-morning the Japanese were going to sleep, so that gave me a welcome reprieve.
The first thing I did was reduce Apache’s KeepAlive timeout to 2 seconds. KeepAlive’s let clients hang on to a connection which someone else could be using. If a client uses keepalive properly then it can give you a nice performance boost, but set the timeout low so slow clients don’t waste server resources.
Then I added HTML caching for the widget serving routine using Perl’s Cache::FileCache. This gave me a huge speed increase but the stats on our widgets were 1 minute delayed – and that sucked.
By Saturday night I’d rolled out the new caching code and the server was a lot faster, but I knew it wouldn’t work long term and non-realtime stats for FEEDJIT was not an option.
By Sunday I was getting 40 hits per second and rising and the server was groaning again. I had to make some fundamental changes to the way the app was architected. The old mod_perl2, MySQL and Apache2 combination wasn’t going to cut it.
So I basically redesigned the data storage routines from the ground up. I moved from mysql to a home grown data access method.
I can’t tell you how gratifying it was when I rolled out the new code last night and watched the server load average drop from 2.5 to 0.3 (unix load where 1.0 = 100%) and hold there as our traffic continued to rise.We have several high traffic blogs now and our busiest blogs generate around 1.5 widget loads (pageviews) per second. I’m confident that if for some reason TechCrunch added us tomorrow, we’d easily handle the traffic without breaking a sweat.
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FEEDJIT notice to bloggers
I posted this a few minutes ago on FEEDJIT. Reposting here:
Sunday, August 19, 6pm PST: A message to our webmasters: Due to massive demand for FEEDJIT widgets and some extremely high traffic blogs using our service, we’ve had to delay the statistics reported by the map widget and the traffic widget by 1 minute. This is to help our servers cope with the increased load. We are working as quickly as we can to get back to real-time reporting and should have a fix within 24 hours. We are currently upgrading our servers to handle the additional traffic and improving the performance of FEEDJIT. Thanks for your patience.