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 one-off 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. I have been a happy Microsoft customer since 1992. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was Vista's miserable popular reception, I picked up an interest in alternatives in early 2008. I chose 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.

FreeBSD used to power the Eno River Analytics Subversion server. It is now the OS for our home server. Its job is to keep our pictures and iTunes music all in one place and serve them via Samba, but we still find use for Subversion, Mediawiki and a few other things.

The blogroll mostly reflects my extracurricular interests.