Category Archives: Mundo Dilbert

Polla Automatic Score Updates

05/30/2026 kirsch 2 Comments

Few people know this, but in every single last polla, entering the scores for the matches was a manual process. When I tell this to people, they find it hard to believe.

It wasn’t that terrible. A few friends volunteered to help and were given special access to do that. And it was almost guaranteed that at least one of us was watching every match anyway. No big deal.

But of course, beyond the manual work, it was always a technical challenge for me to be able to automate it. In 2022 I got very close, but didn’t quite finish it.

I am happy to say that for the all-new, microservices-based Polla 2026, Automatic Score Updates functionality was just pushed to the server!

This is a screenshot of part of Polla 2026 Admin Panel for controlling Automatic Score Updates. You will likely never get to see this for real.

I am using football-data.org to as the data source. The implementation is as simple and stateless as I could make it. Seems right.

Of course, the big problem is that I cannot test it for real before the FIFA World Cup starts. And once it starts, should anything goes wrong, I won’t be able to do anything about it until at least several hours later.

Well, I will be able to pause it, as you can see in the screenshot. This is why I added the ability to pause it.

Hope it goes well. 🤞

Mundo Dilbert

NI Connect cameo

05/19/2025 kirsch Leave a comment

I went to NI Connect in late April, which was held for the first time in Fort Worth.

Notably for someone like me, a cool action shot of me made it to the NI Connect Fort Worth Session Content page. Scroll to the bottom to see…

Photo of Marcos playing with an Oculus Quest 3.

NI Connect Fort Worth Session Content – NI Download

Mundo Dilbert

Patent

05/25/2021 kirsch Leave a comment

Session management for interactive debugging

Recently granted.

PDF US10996268 Download

Mundo Dilbert

Masacotes 2019

05/01/2019 kirsch Leave a comment

Moving up from the Intermediate to the Advanced League has been rough on the team, now on our 19th season.

We still look good, though.

Life of Marcos, Mundo Dilbert

Moving to India

04/01/2017 kirsch 6 Comments

A couple of months ago, I was made a very interesting offer: Move to Bangalore, India, in order to be the Technical Lead of a new R&D team being formed at the office over there.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but after lots of deliberation with my family, I decided to accept.

This will be a three-year stint that could be extended, starting in the fall. We’re very excited and looking forward to eating lots of Indian food.

Further information on exact date, farewell party, and so on will follow.

Mundo Dilbert, Tech

Video: Masacotes vs PBD Stars

07/04/2016 kirsch Leave a comment

Manuel (of the opposing team) recorded all their Volleyball matches using a little Geek Pro. They use them to analyze their matches, correct their mistakes, improve on their technique… or to make fun of each other. He sent me the video of last Thursday’s Championship match which was right around one hour long.

Because nobody wants to watch a one hour long video of mediocre amateur volleyball, I thought it’d be a good idea to edit out the significant dead time. But that’s a lot of tedious work, even for me.

Enter: Amazon Mechanical Turk: “The Artificial Artificial Intelligence”.

Cleverly named after the 18th century fake chess playing machine; which I thought was a well known story but turns out I only know about it because of my odd childhood reading habits; Mechanical Turk is a service that allows you to set up jobs for someone else to do. It’s a great way for those who earn in US Dollars or Euros (but not British pounds!) to get people in China or India or some other low income country to do their menial tasks.

In any case, I uploaded the video to Dropbox and set up a gig, offering $5 to whoever does it.