2010 – Page 2 – Bytes in the Margin

The Breakthrough Institute: Why Energy Efficiency Does not Decrease Energy Consumption

Uncategorized / Oscar M. / September 29, 2010

We've done a number of energy-efficiency projects at our house over the last year. While it may help us lowering our own energy costs and usage, it'd be naive to think that it'll decrease overall energy consumption. Harry Saunders has done the research to explain this effect, know as "the rebound effect". Varying degrees of […]

The Breakthrough Institute: Why Energy Efficiency Does not Decrease Energy Consumption Read More »

Need a time machine to apply for this job?

Uncategorized / Oscar M. / September 24, 2010

More amusement from Craiglist job postings. Hmm, which of these technologies could you seriously have 10 to 15 years of experience with? Fifteen years ago, I was still an undergraduate in college, Amazon did not exists, and EC2/AWS certainly didn't and Java was still a wanna-be Flash plugin for your Browser. The ideal candidate will

Need a time machine to apply for this job? Read More »

A List Apart: Strategic Content Management

Uncategorized / Oscar M. / September 8, 2010

If you're involved in designing, developing, supporting, working with, changing, upgrading, or selecting some sort of content management system, you owe it to yourself to read this article and heed its advice. A good content model is important to make a system useful to the intended users. A good content model also has to be

A List Apart: Strategic Content Management Read More »

Giase: Missing out financially is Mike Petke’s only regret as Red Bulls defender heads into retirement

Soccer / Oscar M. / September 7, 2010

I don’t think any other player could be a fan favorite both in NY/NJ and in D.C. “I’m sure a lot of Red Bull supporters don’t want to hear this, but I absolutely loved my time in D.C.,” Petke said. “It was such a wild ride, something every player should experience. Having experienced that, I

Giase: Missing out financially is Mike Petke’s only regret as Red Bulls defender heads into retirement Read More »

Drupal deployment process example

Uncategorized / Oscar M. / September 3, 2010

I've become quite dependent on simple paper checklists for getting work done. As an aside, I've started looking at Google's integrated Tasks list and it looks like a nice, feature-light alternative to paper todo lists. Below is an example of the checklist I used when moving some new features to our staging server. It doesn't

Drupal deployment process example Read More »

Drupal: Automatically preprocess css/js for IE

Uncategorized / Oscar M. / September 3, 2010

Internet Explorer has a well know bug limiting the number of stylesheets that in can load, see here. This introduces an inconvenient hassle when it comes time to test CSS updates on a Drupal site. You have to remember to go to the performance page and enable CSS preprocessing to get the number of files

Drupal: Automatically preprocess css/js for IE Read More »

Illegal Immigration Has Declined: Why?

Uncategorized / Oscar M. / September 2, 2010

The labor market has to be the overwhelming factor, I have to think. Another way to reduce illegal immigration would be to make it faster, easier to migrate legally. Despite what anti-immigrantion activists want us to believe, there's no "back-of-the-line" to get your papers, so until we reform that process, people will be forced to

Illegal Immigration Has Declined: Why? Read More »

Behind the Scenes of a Live World Cup – NYTimes.com

Soccer / Oscar M. / August 30, 2010

Fascinating details about how the NYTimes interactive team built 3 online features for the 2010 World Cup and how they solved some of the challenges faced. The live match tracker is an interesting exercise in ingesting data real-time from multiple sources and also re-distributing it to thousands (millions?) of clients. As the Sports department planned

Behind the Scenes of a Live World Cup – NYTimes.com Read More »

NetBeans: Creating a unified diff patch

Programming / Oscar M. / August 27, 2010

While trying to submit a patch to a drupal project, I ran into a problem creating a unified diff that could be suspected. It turns out that the way I was using the built in Subversion diff tool in NetBeans wasn't the way to go. Now, on the command line, I'm used to doing a

NetBeans: Creating a unified diff patch Read More »

Netflix iOS app now lets you stream movies on iPhone, iPod touch

Uncategorized / Oscar M. / August 26, 2010

Awesome, now you can watch your Netflix Instant Queue on an iPhone or iPod touch. Pretty soon, many people won't need broadcast television at all. Netflix launched an iPad app months ago that lets users stream movies and TV shows over WiFi or 3G connections. Now you can do the same on an iPhone or

Netflix iOS app now lets you stream movies on iPhone, iPod touch Read More »