Colin's Notes

Using IPUMS Data and SQL to Constructively Speculate on Alternate History [Read More]

Update: Adjusted numbers in last case study to reflect actual earnings and expenses, corrected an error in a calculation. [Read More]

How do you know if you’re making money on your rental property? How can you estimate if a potential deal will make you money? Here are three methods in order of complexity: [Read More]

The recent paper The Total Rate of Return on Everything 1870-2015 has some intriguing findings on housing as an asset class: Returns were approximately the same as stocks with less risk. [Read More]

The last time I made any real use of my tape deck was 1997, and while I played the occasional CD as recently as a decade ago, that was only because I had a player that decoded my MP3 mix CDs. 600 megabytes of MP3s goes a long, long way. [Read More]

Applying the Entity System design to the IPUMS DCP (Data Conversion Program) could improve performance as well as provide new insights into the underlying problem space. [Read More]

The following glossary should help decode terms used in IPUMS documentation and source code, as well as discussions to follow on this blog. [Read More]

If you’ve ever written games, especially ones with many types of “pieces” or needed high-performance, you may have stumbled into some variety of the ECS architecture or half-discovered it by yourself. [Read More]

Here’s a possibly half-baked post on software design. In the end, I’m not sure I have anything more to say than “don’t turn off your brain.” [Read More]

Over the last few years people thinking of renting out their homes have asked me about the details of how to legally rent property in Minneapolis. I’m a (very) small-time landloard and had to figure most of it out for myself. This post summarizes what I’ve learned. The laws continue to change so don’t take all this as the last word on the topic – ask the city. [Read More]