Like many an economist, I use a diversified set of computer tools in my day-to-day research. The ones for which I developed a comfortable proficiency over the years, and which are likely to provide much of this blog's subject matter, are:
- Stata, for statistical analysis. I you're a half decent programmer, Stata is enough for most of your data analysis needs.
- LaTeX, for typesetting (because it looks so darn sciencey)
- Vim, the best text editor ever. (emacs fans are not welcome here.)
- Dropbox. I discovered it in September '09, and it made my work life so, so much easier.
- Spotify, for musical background.
Obviously, I am not claiming that those are the best in their category. Everyone should just choose whichever software they are most comfortable with and stick to it. I am sure that if I had decided to learn emacs rather than vim, I'd be pretty much as happy with it. I chose vim pretty much on a whim, and am sure I will never go back on that decision, simply because of the learning curve of advanced text editors--I do not wish to go through that again!
Anyway I am only saying that those tools work for me, and hence most of the content of this blog will be tips on how to get the most out of them.
Why am I writing this blog? Simply as a way to pay back to the Internet community the help it gave me whenever needed. If I have a problem with LaTeX, most of the time I just have to do a bit of a google search to find someone who had (and solved) the same problem in the past. But sometimes I stumble on problems for which no help is easily available. Those are instances where I can, and arguably should, write clearly my problem and its solution. I hope that at least a few fellow users will benefit from it.
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What? I am sorry -- I am disgusted that you won't even mention the fact that Textmate is way superior to all the other editors, just that you never had the opportunity to work with it simply because you somehow have the wrong operating system on your computer!
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