MATLAB and Octave

MATLAB (matrix laboratory) is a multi-paradigm numerical computing environment and fourth-generation programming language.

GNU Octave is a high-level programming language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with MATLAB.

MATLAB's Rich Java Interoperation

Last night I wanted to figure out how to get rid of the “Start Menu” on the bottom of the IDE and found a solution here. That got me digging into the docs about Java integration. Wow; it just works and seems to work really well. The interop is seamless. For the little coding I did to play around with loading files (it is built in but I was still curious to know) it was really easy to use. Awesome.

Fixing Octave's Plot on the Windows 3.2.4 Release

Out of the box a lot of us Windows users who added all of the Octave-Forge packages are disappointed to find that the plot function produces an invisible window.
Here is the problem and solution:

Realistic solution at this moment, do not install the oct2mat package when you install octave with octave-forge packages if you do not use this package. One one of different solutions is to execute
pkg rebuild -noauto oct2mat
at the octave prompt and then restart octave. The operation results in the oct2mat package not to be auto-loaded in startup. When you want to use oct2mat, execute “pkg load oct2mat” command.

(via octave-forge, via octave-bugs)