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]
Cleaning House After Going Digital
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]
IPUMS Data Conversion as a Slow Motion Entity System
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]
IPUMS Terminology Explained
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]
Learning About Entity Component-System Design
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]
Application Performance: Use and Mis-Use of APIs
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]
Renting Property in Minneapolis
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]
Notes for DCP-Multi Intro
DCP-Multi has (I’m declaring now) emerged from experimental status and it’s time to formalize and document what we’ve created.
[Read More]
Notes for Meeting
DCP-Multi
[Read More]
Fixed Length Record Data (Part Two)
Loading hierarchical fixed-length data into a database
Last time I discussed the FLR format and showed how to use the ‘hflr’ gem to read in FLR format and produce Ruby structs.
[Read More]