Fortunately my code isn't doing much - it's mostly simple scripts to automate various other software and a few basic models. I have released some of my more complex software and do an OSS project in my spare time.

The main problems with releasing code is having to support it. It takes a lot of time. Code often contains hard coded paths, assumptions and so on, which would need to be documented before it was safe for others to use. That just takes too much time for the average researcher. Also for code working in interesting areas, you need some time to have the code to yourself to exploit that area of research and not give others advantage.

You're being unrealistic. As a scientist I'm payed to produce papers, not polish code. If the code does what I want it to do, and I'm satisfied that it is sufficiently unlikely to be problems with it on on the data I am putting into it, that is enough.

If you want me to write perfect code, you should pay me to do so, and hire people for scientific research on the basis of their code. Being hired as a scientist is based on results, not on how well documented the code is or checking every possible input. I'd love to have more time to do every possible test, but I cannot do that and have a career.

BTW, I have produced some code for others to use from my research, and it takes much longer to get it into a usable and documented state than the usual run of the mill script I write.

If he's missed the opportunity, can I plug my software instead? :-) Hey, great scientific plotting package, Veusz!!! Get it while it's hot.

Bifferboard - 1W power consumption, USB and ethernet - only 29 GBP. Runs standard x86 distributions.

Not true: See here

Pretty convincing. It appears to show any of the information or photos I can see about myself or my friends.Presumably a very popular facebook app could harvest data on pretty well everyone in facebook, no matter their privacy settings.

That sounds great. This must be new in emacs 23 - I can't see it in 22.2.1 I have here.

How about adding word wrapping when displaying? My local emacs expert wasn't even able to do that, but MS Notepad can do it. It's really useful for editing latex documents where your want a paragraph on a single line (that makes it much easier to search for phrases).

It does do curve fitting (fitting functions to data). It doesn't do enough statistical analysis however.

You can call python code to do it, though it should have a UI for doing it.

Thanks for your comments.

What sort of plotting do you do? Can you give me some idea of what the most useful plots missing from Veusz are? I know it doesn't do 3D plots, but I don't find them generally useful (except for volume renderings, etc.).

Veusz, my scientific plotting package, is up to revision 1009, and I'm virtually the single author and a volunteer. It has been in development since 2003. The output, IMHO, looks quite a bit nicer than PLPlot.

Our 8TB raid system would get trashed after copying data onto it (group descriptor checksums on fsck). It looks like it was an ext4 bug. They fixed it about a week or two ago, here. Maybe it will get in your kernel soon. I'm not going to start ext4 on any production system for at least 6 months I think now.

Modal dialog boxes interrupt workflow. We need to make most dialog boxes modeless and dockable.