2. Blog

MetaLibrary Documentation Live

Over the last four years, I’ve been working on an AI called WmDOT for OpenTTD, a remake of the classic Transport Tycoon, a beloved game from my childhood. To support WmDOT, I’ve built a library of support functions. Over the last three days, I have written up documentation for the included functions and the result can be seen live at my site at http://minchin.ca/openttd-metalibrary/ I’m excited to have it up. I hope it will help others make use of my library.

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Alberta Bankruptcy Exceptions

Out of curiosity, I looked up the Alberta Bankruptcy Exceptions. In a nutshell, this is what you can keep even if you declare bankruptcy:

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Scientific Poetry

I came across this little ditty and got a kick out of it. Hope it makes you smile.

A friend who’s in liquor production,
Has a still of astounding construction,
The alcohol boils,
Through old magnet coils,
He says that it’s proof by induction

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Genealogy is Up!

Many years ago when I first bought minchin.ca, I thought it would be neat to put my genealogy online. This stemmed, in part, from the fact that most of the genealogy research I was doing was online. But it’s taken a long time to figure out how to generate the webpages a way I wanted. I wanted a website that I could update without the links changing, and a way to hide the information about living people. Just this last week I found Adam, an online service hosted by Tim Forsythe, that will do that for me. So now my genealogy is up! Check it out at minchin.ca/genealogy/ genealogy.minchin.ca.

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Real Men

Men are loyal. Men are honest. Men respect and honor women. A man goes out and finds one woman, and he vows to protect and love her for the rest of his life. A man would never betray that vow. Even the weakest and most cowardly man — if he is a man at all — would die for the woman he loves….

You don’t have to be “cool” or athletic. You don’t have to play guitar or fix cars. These are all fine things, but they don’t define a man. A man is defined by how he treats women, by how he keeps his promises, and by how he protects and serves the ones he loves. That’s what makes a man a man.

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World from Space, Over the Year

World from Space, Over the Year
This NASA moving image, recorded by satellite over a full year as part of their Blue Marble Project, shows the ebb and flow of the seasons and vegetation.

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Plead the Fifth

A reminder that the odds are so stacked against you, you probably should just plead the fifth (i.e. stay silent) every time you have to talk to the cops. It’s a combination of more crimes than the (US) Federal government can count (and thus the very real possibility you’re committed a crime unknowingly), plus the ability of cops to take your statements out of context and spin them against you. Plus, you avoid the possibility of a providing a false confession — confessing to a crime you didn’t commit, sometimes just to get the cops to leave you alone.

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Problems with PRISM (and the need for Privacy)

Recently, American Edward Snowden exposed a ton of information about what information the US government, via the NSA, is collecting off the internet. The NSA, naturally, had given anything but a straight answer. It seems the NSA program exists in some form, but many details remain murky. No matter, Edward said he wanted to have a discussion about surveillance, and perhaps privacy, and that is what this post is really about.

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Alberta Yellows — Photo 100 — Project 365

Alberta Yellows — Photo 100 — Project 365
Alberta is amazing for its landscapes. Much of it is flat, and combined with roads surveyed before anyone lived there on even mile spacing, you can get roads that seem to go on forever. This picture was take in October (Thanksgiving weekend, actually) and so the grass was basically dead but the snow had yet to come, leaving this beautiful palette of yellows.

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Push a Hg Repo to GitHub

So the scenario is thus: There is a project that I want to contribute to that is a Mercurial (Hg) repository (or ‘repo’ for short). I’ve taken a liking to Git; GitHub in particular with their new and beautiful Windows frontend. So how do I take a remote Hg repo and push it to GitHub. As follows (the following assumes you have a Ubuntu box available to play with, although I imagine many Linux machines would work the same way):

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