A Widget in the blog

More Florida Cams Launching

More love for the East Coast crew: New Smyrna Inlet and Flagler Ave in New Smyrna, FL have been added to the growing list of North/Central Florida surf cameras on Surfline.com.

New Smyrna Inlet Surf Camera:

http://www.surfline.com/reports/report.cfm?id=4420

Flagler Ave, New Smyrna Surf Camera:

http://www.surfline.com/reports/report.cfm?id=5327

The Flagler camera is fixed on the main break at Flagler. The Inlet Camera pans from the North Jetty down through NSInlet and south.

Thanks mucho to the local crew for the hook-ups and hospitality during the installations. You know who you are... ;-)

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

well our friends over at wavewatch once again prove that they are followers not leaders. Their shiny new forecast tool is a reasonable attempt to copy the surfline dashboard (now on version 3). However, what they always fail to mention is that the display is only as good as the data behind it.
Wavewatch.com (using NOAA wavewatch3 data - confused? I'm sure NOAA are) has a resolution of 1 degree (60 miles)
Surfline.com (using LOLA, a stand-alone and surf tuned forecast model) has a resolution of 60 miles in open ocean, 15 miles in the Npac and Natl hurricane basins and down to 100meters in nearshore areas - most of the US, hawaii, Baja, South Africa, Fiji.

why do I sometimes feel like the Mac/PC ads.. "Hi I'm surfline...."

You are The One

We often hear comments from people that run like this: "Man, I'll go service the cameras! Can I surf while I'm there?"

The answer is "yes" - and we have two open positions to prove it. Work from home, travel to the various breaks to fix a cam, surf while you're there... repeat. And, oh yeah, we'll send you a paycheck.

Interested parties go here:
http://www.boardsportjobs.com/jobdetails.cfm?jid=526

PS. See that picture? It's an image captured from the cam at our last install, in El Salvador. I surfed it while there... in 85 degree water.

PSS. Help me bring back the blink tag and we'll really piss this guy off: The Blink Free Homepage

The quadcam

The trusty old quad cam, bane of all things surfline. Originally created to allow us to quickly check our camera status, it was released in an unfinished state to the world. It has a number of problems (notably a huge memory leak in the flash code - we think) that causes it to freeze or crash browsers. A new version is slated to be released sometime in the next few months.

Can we come out to play now?

After what seems like days (because it was days) in a freezing, noisy data center we finally think the issues with the site have been resolved, a combination of hardware re-wiring, some software changes and tuning of our application servers seems to show a website thats more responsive, more stable, and, if i dare say it, considerably faster than pre-move. Now what we need is some surf. (HB this morning - 1-2 glassy and fair)

Provisioning quickly... adding resources for Premium Members

"We're not outta the woods yet..."

We've added new dual duo core blades and are provisioning them as quickly as we can to service our premium users. Premiums come first -- so hopefully by Monday we'll have dedicated systems running for our core users.

We're in for a long weekend... so we're refueling the forces with coffee and heading back into the data center. Bring on the crash carts...

Hang in there everyone -- we have reinforcements across the board and are working non-stop through the weekend.

Update on Site Outage 1/29/07

The new data center team has made limited progress and we're seeing 10's of thousands of pages views again - which unfortunately is just shy of the 100's we usually see. We've escalated all issues with the people who do this sort of thing for us -- and they assure us that we're closer than we were yesterday, which is the best we can get right now.

We've had everyone and their dog looking at the issues for us from the top technical minds we can find to the lowliest of sales guys, who once today, while looking over the shoulder of one of the frazzled tech gurus enquired, "So... 'green' is good, right?"

The tech's dry response... "No. 'Green' is green, dude..."

Slow progress.

Surfline Outage 1/27/07

You'd think after so many years of doing this tech thing that it'd get easier... but alas. It sometimes happens every time we've ever moved our data center operation that we have issues with connectivity, and we are hit hard by our move over the weekend. It appears that the site is now coming back, but we're still working to iron out the final kinks. We've had everything from load balancer issues to routing issues, to upstream packet loss on multiple providers, etc. Not out of the woods, but looking better right now. More as we know it...

Premium Video Forecasts Launched

Blood, sweat, and tears.... we've birthed another product, and a new reason to subscribe:
Video Forecasts

Surfline looking for Flash Pros

Do you program in Flash? We have a designer kicking a-- and need programmers to pair up with him and help us build the next rev of our forecasting dash, camera and video players, etc.

Apply to nerdery at surfline.com. My 'unbiased' opinion is that this is the coolest job and best work environment you'll ever find.

See also: Surfline Job Postings

Improved Regional Forecasts

The forecast dashboard has been causing a great deal of confusion recently. The reason was that the forecaster comments "2-4ft occasionally 5ft and fair" were for an entire region (e.g. Southern California or Florida) but the graphs were for a specific location (e.g. South Orange County or North Florida) - We finally managed to correct this. So now the comments and the graph should match up. If they don't - read the comments, the forecasters are normally far more accurate than the machines.

Welcome!

This blog is to allow surfline users to comment, question and discuss surfline.com Fire away. We'll try to answer everybody.

New Blog... Old Blog

We've had issues with Blogger as they've migrated to Google accounts, so we restarted our blog here. The old blog is still available and may have some useful tidbits.

FYI