This time we have for you an interview with Heino Prinz, a biochemist and author of the book Numerical Methods for the Life Scientist: Binding and Enzyme Kinetics Calculated with GNU Octave and MATLAB. Heino tells us about himself, how the book came to be and who will benefit from it. Enjoy the interview and check out the book!

GNU Octave "is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations". GNU Octave 2.x, although very useful, used to be slow. What about now, when there is Octave 3.2?

How to install Octave 3.2 and its Image processing package on Arch Linux. In short, Octave is easy (i.e. pacman -S octave), while Image package requires some additional steps. Also a few, simple Octave commands are shown for image creation and rotation that can be used to test if Image package was installed.

Today’s interview is with Ivan Idris, author of NumPy 1.5 Beginner’s Guide a book for developers or scientists with a little Python experience and wanting to test NumPy’s capabilities. We talk about the book, how it came to be and the experience writing it. Enjoy!

Both Matlab and Octave (i.e. its open source equivalent) are not very friendly as far as default function arguments are concerned. Therefore, a simple script for both MATLAB and Octave is provided, along with some examples of its usage, that makes working with default function arguments little easier.

Packt is pleased to announce Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide, a new book that will help newbies to get started with Joomla! and quickly go beyond the basics. Written by Eric Tiggeler, an experienced Joomla! tutorial writer as well as the author of a Dutch Joomla! Manual, this beginner's guide will help readers build and maintain impressive user-friendly websites with Joomla! 1.5.

I recently discovered a fairly new project that has an interesting take on Linux music production: the Open Octave Project. The goal of Open Octave is to provide an environment for audio and MIDI production specifically for orchestral music and film scoring.

Our latest interview is with Amit Saha, responsible for Fedora Scientific, a Fedora based distribution geared towards scientists, students and professionals alike. The distribution is packed with software like GNU Octave, R, Maxima and many more. Give Fedora Scientific a spin! Enjoy the interview!

I had the chance to interview Thomas Hansen, who recently announced the Gaia Programming Contest (€10,000 reward). Here are his enlightening answers!