On December 11, 2009 portaudit turned up a problem in a package called libtool-2.2.6a_1. So, as usual, I figured I'd go to whatever port that is, and do a portupgrade. Unfortunately, whereis libtool turned up no such port. What's the rookie accidental admin to do?
Take good notes, for one. While dabbling in an unrelated topic -- [...]

One drawback of a system that's giving you very little trouble is that between bouts of fixing whatever does occasionally go wrong you forget what you're supposed to do. We should all be this lucky, but it's still an annoyance.
FreeBSD, for example, will sometimes turn up a damaged package or two in response to #portaudit. [...]

The books I'm reading these days come with examples of code, saved on associated web sites. Sometimes that code is neatly packaged into a zip archive or tarball, with every piece of code sitting in a directory named after the chapter it was referenced in. But other times these web sites have the code sitting [...]

Microsoft makes this free utility called SyncToy. I don't know if it will come standard with Windows 7, but it probably should. It provides a very elegant way to back up your data to an external hard drive or to a Samba share. You can even schedule it to run regularly, say right after you're [...]

It took me long enough to figure this out to be worth documenting. If you use Windows, you can use TortoiseSVN with a local repository, installed by default on C:\svn. But you can also use TortoiseSVN to connect to a remote UNIX repository. They hook up through PuTTY, and the protocol is svn+ssh://.
There are several [...]

I set up a Subversion server on the FreeBSD box a while back, then didn't do much with it until this past weekend, when Software Carpentry mentioned it.
I installed SmartSVN on the Ubuntu box and declared a new repository with a svn+ssh:// protocol. I figured it would make sense, since I connect to the server [...]

I set up Samba a while back, and that turned out to be a great way to get stuff I used to keep on separate Windows computers all in one place on the FreeBSD box, as readily accessible as if they were still on the original local hard drives. Now I'd like to do the [...]

What can a Stata user do with a Samba server? Pretty much the same thing you would do with any computer. My Stata is installed on my Windows PC. Now Samba allows me to store either do-files or data on the remote FreeBSD server and access them easily.
Suppose that the remote box were called myUnix. [...]

It was about time, too. I'm an economist by trade and that harms my programming habits. But the more I program, the more I'm aware of that, so I guess all hope is not lost. I've been meaning to adopt some sort of version control for a long time now. I had already installed Subversion [...]

R took a long time to compile yesterday because it depends on all kinds of things that I didn't have installed already. One of them is the Tcl/Tk language, which apparently comes from two separate FreeBSD ports -- one named tcl85 and the other tk85. The latter made trouble. It aborted the installation and it [...]