Unfortunately you're correct. I tried KOffice as OpenOffice does suck in many ways, but when it couldn't render text properly on paper I had to give up.

If you're going to the trouble of messing with PCI hardware, I'm sure one of these tiny circuits, which can be hidden in a USB socket, could be used to take over a machine remotely much more easily. Adding radio remote access would be pretty easy.

Dear Barack - You're a prick, Yours Tony Blair and David Cameron.

Forge an email and stop someone entering the US for life!

I might doubt the cost too, but 8 bit microcontrollers are very popular now, even with the widespread availability of 32 bit systems. Many consumer devices include Microchip and Atmel chips if they don't need more power. There's also a bit Arduino (Atmel) hobby crowd.

Private Eye, a UK satirical/current affairs magazine comes out twice a month with quite a bit of investigative journalism and lots of things you don't read any where else. They website contains hardly any of their content and they still have quite a few subscribers.

I found some of my Modula 2 code from 1993 in an ancient zip file inside a tar.gz file. Unfortunately that code references files in the directory of an older version of that program from 1991ish which I don't have. I do have a load of files stranded on Amstrad 3 inch PCW disks. I wonder whether those work at all?

Here it is

If you find matplotlib hard, try my Veusz python plotting package. It has a GUI you can build plots within. It is scriptable in python, and even the saved file format is a python script to generate the plot. It can read a variety of data formats.

Don't go to Maplin - they are very expensive. It's best to go to BitsBox - personal service, cheap delivery, good prices, and a reasonable range of stuff beginners would need.

It's fine to give code to referees who want to see it under peer review. I have no problems with that.

If you release code more generally, you need to support it. You will get questions. If you don't answer them, your work will be brought into question. What's this thing about "working as advertised"? Scientific code is quite often written to be used for a short time on specific inputs on a specific computer system. It won't "work as advertised" without a lot of support and hand-holding.

By assumptions, I mean things such as filename standards, format of data, and so on. These aren't scientific assumptions, but assumptions of the code itself, so are different things.

And keeping code private isn't to stop people reproducing what you did, but to not allow others an advantage in an area you are working on.

Reproduction of results is about independent verification anyway, so they probably should be starting with the raw data and not working with an existing code.

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