While the recent revelations from Snowden have put a spotlight on the efforts of the NSA to spy on seemingly everything, one of the surprising results is that those that were labelled ‘paranoid’ and dismissed in years past no longer seem paranoid enough. 0 comments more ...

Quick on the heals of the release of version 7, version 8 of MetaLibrary has been released.

To recap, MetaLibrary is a collection of code I’ve written to simplify writing an AI for OpenTTD, a remake of my childhood favorite, Transport Tycoon.

Version 8 brings a 9-30x improvement in the speed of Lakes, and by extension, a speed-up in the Ship Pathfinder. And that’s all for now; I figured that would be enough. The documentation for MetaLibrary has also been updated.

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MetaLibrary moves forward again!

Building off my recent announcement that documentation is now live, I have completed a fairly major update to MetaLibrary.

To recap, MetaLibrary is a collection of code I’ve written to simplify writing an AI for OpenTTD, a remake of my childhood favorite, Transport Tycoon.

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I have been continuing my research of the Bunbury line. For the 18th century and earlier, Burke’s Peerage has proved incredibly useful. As Burke’s is serves mainly for showing how someone inherited their title or lands, it tends to be patrilineal (meaning descent is calculated through men). However, the wives are often well noted, including the wife’s father. Such is the link between the Bunbury’s and the Birkenhead’s. 0 comments more ...

While much has been written about Facebook, this isn’t about how Facebook as a website or a company has changed, but rather how my relationship with it has changed. I am particularly inspired to write this this morning after reading this article by Cassey Johnston in Ars Technica. 0 comments more ...

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. 0 comments more ...

Out of curiosity, I looked up the Alberta Bankruptcy Exceptions. In a nutshell, this is what you can keep even if you declare bankruptcy: 0 comments more ...

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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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. 0 comments more ...

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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