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. 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. But now I'm taking this class.

The blogroll mostly reflects my extracurricular interests.