A free replacement for MATLAB
I've recently been playing with a few scientific tools to find a free replacement for MATLAB, a tool which I think prays too much on the fact that its in a lot of academic facilities throughout the world, I have an issue with the student version...but I won't go into that now.
At the moment I am finding it hard to choose my replacement, on one hand you have Scilab which is really fast, and on the other you have Octave which has an amazingly active community. At present I am dodging in and out of each on my machine but I am heading more towards the Octave camp than the Scilab camp purely for the community.
If you are in a similar position as me then go check them out and if you find anything particularly great about either let me know!