Many Bothans died to bring us this information. A The MKX® exclusive, “The iBeats”:
All posts by kirsch
Polla Brasileira 2014
The World Cup fever keeps increasing, and I’m about to make it better:
Announcing Polla Brasileira 2014. I have run other successful pollas (note: under definition #5) before. What made them so much fun is that instead of using some manual management tool such as paper, email, or Excel spreadsheets, I went through the trouble of developing a full online system from scratch which made everything very real-time and interactive. Back then I wrote the system using PHP and stored all the data in plain text files – no database. It was simple and limited, but it worked.
They were a huge success:
- Polla FIFA 2006: 81 participants
- La Polla América 2007: 69 participants
It wasn’t all fun and games though. The Polla is known to cause health issues on some of the participants:
When I decided to cancel the Europolla 2008, soccer fans were disappointed:
This time, Polla Brasileira is back with a vengeance and it is better than ever. I’ve been making some massive improvements to the system, working through nights (as I said, the Polla is known to cause health issues). Amongst them:
- A proper login/account system. You can now stay logged in to the system, change your information, use Gravatar, email verification, captcha… This is a huge improvement over what I had. I’m using code from The PHP-LOGIN project and they will get a donation.
- Security enhancement: Passwords are stored only in hashed/salted form – nobody, not even I can retrieve them.
- Security enhancement: We are using SSL so all the information is transmitted securely. You may not care about the NSA knowing what you predict for Croatia VS Cameroon, but your passwords are transmitted too.
- Responsive layout. When we last did the polla, there were no iPhones – Blackberrys ruled the world and they were only useful for texting. Now the website should scale and display nicely across all your devices. Try it out!
- New and improved look.
- Full use of MySQL. No more plain text junk, we now have a proper database system. This is a gigantic back-end overhaul and has been worth it so far. I’m using code from ezSQL and they will get a donation.
- Facebook page replaces the forum and news sections. Last time we did the polla, Facebook was not popular… Go and Like it!
- And many other enhancements across the board.
Doing the polla is a lot of work for me, but it would not be possible without the support of my friends helping out:
- Moi, CSS guru
- Eva, treasurer
- José Antonio, SQL consultant
- Shlomit, proofreader and hasn’t divorced me
- And everyone else who’s helped in one way or another…
You can register now!
Panini World Cup Brazil 2014 sticker album
I know I’m a little late to the party (only 32 more days!), but I finally started my 2014 World Cup sticker album. Progress is slow but steady, and you can track it here.
Heartbleed Bug t-shirts
Chances are you aren’t quite sick of hearing about The Hearbleed Bug just yet. But you will be soon. While it’s still relevant and if you hurry up, you can be the coolest nerd around by wearing a new Hartbleed Bug t-shirt. Three classy designs available, way more severe than #gotofail, only at The Heartbleed Bug Unofficial Store.
Capitol 10K
HONK!TX in the Park!
Points to Jaramillo for letting us know about HONK!TX 2014 Festival of Community Street Bands a week ago on Saturday.
I had never heard about it. We made it to watch a few things at Spider House. It was great. Here’s a couple of videos.
D20 Brass Band play music from The Legend of Zelda.
Double Rainbow!
A few minutes ago, as seen from the office right after some hail.
Illya Kuryaki and The Valderramas @SXSW
Last SXSW 2014 post. Argentinian duo Illya Kuryaki and The Valderramas was in town. Since they don’t sing in English, most locals have no clue who they are. I credit my coolo shaking skills more to them than I do to Miley.
The concert was at The North Door. Great venue: Excellent sound, good pizza, short lines for beer. The rest of the lineup for the night:
- Los Petit Fellas: I missed them but was told they were very good.
- Rebel Cats: Odd Mexican band than plays 50s rock. Rarely do you see a bass being abused so badly.
- División Minúscula: Reasonably well known Northern Mexican band that play indistinct generic rock.
- Porter: Guadalajara based electronic rock. Lead singer seems like a nice guy.
Enough, cellphone videos from my excellent vantage point:
Jaguar House (IKV):
Coolo (IKV):
Peggy Sue (Rebel Cats):
SXSW Start-Up Nation Israel Showcase & Networking Event
Not quite done with SXSW-related posts just yet.
Myself (lead writer of this blog), Louise Kahn (lead singer of Terry Poison), Albert (lead singer of his shower), Jason (not a singer but quite a dancer), Anna Landesman (SynthGuitar and B-Vox). Photo-bombed by Jeff (lead founder of Vonage).
In the middle of SXSW Interactive, right before the music festival begins, I went to this event organized by the Government of Israel Economic Mission and Israel Bonds. There was food, drinks, music, and a bunch of interesting start ups showing off their work.
Israeli band Terry Poison played after the event. Really good show… the singer climbed on to every wall in the bar in her heels. Very daring.
SXSWeros
Read: “South by South Westeros”. Hahaha, get it? (their tag line, not mine). If you don’t get it, then you probably don’t watch HBO’s popular TV series Game of Thrones. If you don’t watch it due to its premise (dragons! fantasy lands! magic!) I don’t blame you, but I guarantee that if you can get past your prejudices, you will like it.
In any case, HBO has put together a Game Of Thrones Exhibition and they brought it to Austin for SXSW.
What they did is take props from the show, which are impressively detailed and well made, and put it all up on display as if it were a museum. It’s very cool to see for fans of the show. It’s also very sad that you never ever see a line this long in order to get into a real museum.
They also had a replica of the iron throne that you could sit on and have your photo taken (wait time: 45 minutes) and an Oculus Rift powered Wall of Ice elevator simulator (wait time: 180 minutes) that look unbelievably cool. Unfortunately for the reader, I did not wait in line for either.
