noaa - Bluefin Engineering

Using AWS and GAE to parse and store a million records

Posted by Randy Findley on Jul 23, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

I recently used an Extra Large EC2 Instance to parse and store a million records into a Google App Engine Datastore. I had to fetch and parse a million Tidal Current Predictions from NOAA for our Marine Weather mobile application. Our Marine Weather application is powered by the Google App Engine (GAE). The GAE Datastore provides extremely fast read times. When the Marine Weather app requests a Tidal Current Prediction the latency is around 100 ms. Screen scraping and parsing all this information was time consuming and required a lot of memory (my mac throw an OutOfMemoryError). Yes I might...

Marine Weather hits the Apple app store

Posted by Randy Findley on Feb 3, 2012 in Blog, Marine Weather | 0 comments

Marine Weather by Bluefin is now available on your iPhone, iPad, and iTouch device. This app provides marine forecasts, live buoy data, tide predictions, current predictions, sun rise/set times, radar, and sea surface temperatures. What else could a mariner need? If you think of something please let us know and we’ll add it Marine Weather by Bluefin is great for boaters, fisherman, sailors, kayakers, scuba divers, and surfers. Our goal is to provide mariners with the latest marine weather to keep them safe and enjoying the water. Here is where you can get the apps: Marine Weather by...