We headed Down East to Winter Harbor for their 45th annual Lobster Festival; it was my first visit however since Winter Harbor is close to Prospect Harbor where Robin grew up she has been many times as well as ran in the race they have.

We arrived mid-morning and the streets were busy; stands everywhere selling different nick-knacks, etc. There were many different stands, a few which gave me an idea to possibly sell photos at events like this next year. We came across a tree that had been carved and painted to resemble a lobster claw, I thought that they did a great job. We met up with Robin’s mother and walked around for awhile until we decided to head to Schoodic Byway to look around and take photos. There’s an area that I know of that overlooks the ocean, the view can be seen while standing on a ledge of about 50 or so feet up. It has different holes that the Ocean as worn away at. It’s a beautiful area that not a lot of people know about and great for watching sunsets. This visit was more about exploring the surrounding area’s trails the lined the edge of the cliff rather than sitting at the edge together and watching the Ocean. We stopped at several other areas along the byway, one being a rocky shoreline that faced the East. We spent some time there looking for Crabs, Sandollars, Starfish and taking photos of the area.

Later on we drove to Corea and found a nice little scenic harbor view in which we took a few different photos. On the dock fisherman left their traps; we looked through them all to see if anything was left behind. We found a couple of Starfish that were alive at the time of the trap being in the water however when the traps were taken out and placed in the boat the Starfish limbs had dropped over the cages’ bars and hardened due to death. We looked around a bit, enjoyed the scenery and then headed home for the evening; I really enjoy finding areas like this that we can explore together and have a good time.

We decided to head up to Kokadjo to visit with Dad, pick Raspberries (The best fruit ever) and to possibly kayak. This weekend was the start of August and it’s near two week straight of warm weather- nearly the first all Summer. The weather was 78 with mostly clear blue skies and sporadic southern breeze.

We arrived to the camp at around 2PM, talked for a few minutes and then Dad brought us into an area that had a lot of Raspberries; and area that I wanted to show Robin as she has never visited Big Lyford Pond. We started picking in an area that look like it had been cleared (trees cut down) a few years ago and the trees, plant life, etc. Within an hour we had about a quart of berries between the both of us, we moved on to a similar area down the road and continued picking until Robin came across fresh Bear poop and moved further down the road where we found a good sized berry patch as well as blue berries. Altogether we picked about 3 quarts of Raspberries and a 1/2 cup of Blueberries after about 2 hours- normally in that time frame we’d pick about 6 quarts or so.

…continue reading – Big Lyford kayaking

Today provided us with mostly clear skies in the high 70’s bordering 80’s; so after church Robin and I headed to Sunkhaze Meadows. The last time we were there we hiked a long a couple of trails so this time I wanted to kayak Sunkhaze Stream. When we arrived, there was no boat landing which was expected since it’s a Wildlife preserve so we parked next to a small bridge and carried our kayaks down the side of the bridge. While putting in I said the Robin that this is the type of steam I really enjoy, it’s not too wide, varies from 5-10ft and has just enough current to slowly move you along. Once in the water the current took a hold of us and slowly taxied us through bends and curves through its lush canopies and shore-lined dunes of grass and plant life. Each bend brought different sights of interest; fallen logs, boulders, open areas with tall grass and sporadic varying trees. For the most part there was very little wildlife to be seen besides a Sandpiper, female Wood ducks and a Beaver.

No man-made noises could be heard, only the sounds of lightly flowing water, a cool breeze whisping through tress and over long dune grass, and the sounds of chickadees, American Goldfinches, quacking ducks, Cedar Waxwings and the flapping of Dragon fly wings. We had an excellent leisurely afternoon kayak trip; the only thing missing was a kayak picnic. I have wanted to take a photo of my gear in my kayak so you can see how it’s carried- eventually I am going to get an inflatable sealable bag for it.

Roughly three weeks ago I updated JKOgden.net’s back-end and front-end; this is more of an intermediate’s guide to enabling mod_deflate and other tweaks and is partly intended for VPS servers as far as enabling mod_deflate.

First I’d like to talk a little about mod_deflate, first and foremost the module needs to be enabled in your Apache 2.x configuration so if it is not already you must recompile Apache and if you’re going to do that I would also suggest installing APC Accelerator which is a caching system for PHP. I have read some articles that you can add code to your .htaccess file to enable mod_deflate without having it enabled in your Apache configuration, however I have found that not to be true by looking into Apache log (/usr/local/apache/logs/error_log).

What is mod_deflate and why is it so important? When you request a file such as http://www.jkogden.net/index.php, your browser talks to a web server. The conversation looks a little like this:

1. Browser: GET /index.php HTTP 1.1 Accept-encoding gzip,deflate
2. Server: looks for index.php (/var/www/…/index.php)
3. Server: HTTP/1.x 200 OK No encoding available 300KB <html></html>
4. Browser: 300KB? Whoa, that’s a lot of data

As you can see, with all of the html tags, text, etc the text is quite large and is an inefficient usage of bandwidth.

What do you normally do when a file is too big to send? You use your favorite compression utility and zip it. If we could send a .zip file to the browser (index.php.zip) instead of plain old index.php, we’d save on bandwidth and download time. The browser could download the zipped file, extract it, and then present it to user.

Here’s an updated conversation when accessing a site configured with mod_deflate:

1. Browser: GET /index.php HTTP 1.1 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
2. Server: looks for index.php (/var/www/…/index.php)
3. Server: HTTP/1.x 200 OK Content-Encoding: gzip 30KB
4. Browser: 30KB? Nice, let me unzip it

…continue reading – Apache 2.x performance tweaking with mod_deflate and misc other tweaks