About this blog

This is not another Stata tutorial. There is already an excellent one here, another here, and StataCorp offers its own NetCourses for a very reasonable fee. Rather, it is a collection of practices I find useful when running Stata in a production setting — where code needs to be deployed in more flexible ways than is typically done with the kind of custom do-files one writes for academic research.

I write about FreeBSD because it’s a good way to get my notes on it all in one place. They're not that numerous yet because I haven't been using it very long. I have been a Microsoft customer since 1992. I picked up an interest in alternatives in early 2008, when I decided that Eno River Analytics would need a proper network with a file server, for secure ftp exchanges and other such needs. I picked FreeBSD over some Linux or another because I found it easiest to understand and work with. Timing helped, I guess, because that same year two great books came out on the subject -- Absolute FreeBSD - 2nd Edition, by Michael W. Lucas, and Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 - A Modular Approach, by Bryan J. Hong.

Now that I'm sold, I also want to start a trend of mentioning Stata and FreeBSD in the same place. If it catches on, maybe the good people at StataCorp will find a minute and build a Stata install for FreeBSD. There is already one for Debian Linux.

The C++ category was originally meant for quick notes for this class I took at NCSU online in the fall of 2008. For things that I kept forgetting how to handle, because I didn't use them often enough, I thought it would be easier to just keep this blog open in a different tab than to toggle to the original lab pages that explained them, and wade through stuff I don't really care about. And I figured if I'd jot these notes down, that might help me remember these things better. That remains true, though I took a few more classes since then.

The blogroll mostly reflects my extracurricular interests.