island94.org

I’m partial to the following WYSIWYG editors for Drupal:

• WidgEditor – stupid simple
• TinyMCE – way complicated powerful

But Super Capers neither of them work well enough for me to want to use them. The trade-off for using these is that it’s easy to make pretty text, but if you ever need to manually edit, it’s incredibly painful. The biggest problem is that they don’t make new lines for paragraph breaks, smashing everything together into one huge, ugly block. And since Drupal has a nice, built-in filter for creating paragraph elements, it’s redundant (and infuriating).

The only markup you need is bold, emphasis, links, pictures and a way to turn it off. WordPress seems to get it.

I just started auditing a Mathematical Models in Biology class and Matlab is one of the requirements. I had relatively good experience with the free, open source alternative,Octave back in college, but then I was running Linux, not OSX. It took me about an hour to figure out how to set it up (I was a little worried for a bit).

1. Download the Octave binary for OSX from Octaveforge.
2. Install Octave and Gnuplot (in the extras folder). I just dragged them to /Applications (X11 is required for Gnuplot—should be found on OSX install disk)
3. Set the environment variable for gnuplot (Octave is supposed to do this automatically, but it didn’t for me):sudo ln -s /Applications/GnuPlot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot /usr/bin/gnuplot
   (thanks for the help, Toby)
4. Download and install (again in /Applications) Aquaterm which will actually render the gnuplot graphs.
5. Within Gnuplot, set the renderer: “terminal aqua”
6. Try it out in Octave (I had to restart Octave and Gnuplot to get it all to work):x = linspace(-pi, pi, 100);
y = sin(x);
plot(x, y);

Thank you: High Performance Computing for Mac OS X, the Octave Wiki and Google for helping me find what I needed.