Monte Carlo solver

Just wanted to post a quick video of a coupled Monte Carlo transport-Poisson equation solver for a 2D MESFET. The colored background is a heat map of electric field strength, while the white dots represent individual electrons being accelerated and scattered in the device. Sorry for the low quality. YouTube decided that was acceptable, despite having a higher-quality source available. Each frame is 2e-15 seconds, and the total length corresponds to 8e-12 seconds.

MATLAB may not be completely terrible

I use MATLAB a lot, but I wish I could use it less. I have a few reasons for not liking it:

• I prefer to use VIM and the command line for everything. The MATLAB IDE isn't my favorite.
• It's closed source (not optimal, but not necessarily a deal-breaker) and expensive (unless you're a student).
• Lots of useful code is sold as addons. The parallel computing toolbox, for example, is not included in the standard version of MATLAB.
• The language itself isn't as nice as Python is, at least for me. Language choice is a highly personal matter, however.

For these reasons, I am trying to install Numeric Python as a replacement for MATLAB. So far, it's a huge struggle. The value in having a working product out of the box is not insignificant. Python support on OS X isn't as strong as could be hoped, and the recent upgrade to Lion has also broken some dependencies. I am eschewing pre-built binaries for locally compiled versions to get around these issues. I'll update this post with resources.