I'm just really enjoying sitting at my kitchen table with this debian-running ibook and surfing the net. Now if only I had wireless networking so I could eliminate the long green ethernet cable running from my kitchen table to the DSL modem. And not have to move the modem from the living room to the kitchen.
Been having to do an inordinate amount of work in matlab for a neural networks class. I'm fanatic enough to try to avoid working with nonfree software more or less (yes I still have a MacOS machine), so I really enjoyed discovering GNU Octave (which I had run across three times before looking for a music notation program), which is just about a clone of matlab, except without a lot of the recent graphing and GUI features. However, my ultimate goal is to start doing this work with PDL. Because if there's one thing I try to avoid more than nonfree software, it's programming languages other than Perl.
It's weird how you learn something, and then it comes in handy later. I first heard about PDL in the early days of Perl6, back in those crazy days when I was trying to drink the firehose. At the time, it made no sense to me at all. But then when I was introduced to matlab, I immediately recalled PDL and finally understood what it was for.
Give me PDL + Perl/Gtk over matlab any day.
