Fixing Octave's Plot on the Windows 3.2.4 Release

Out of the box a lot of us Windows users who added all of the Octave-Forge packages are disappointed to find that the plot function produces an invisible window.
Here is the problem and solution:

Realistic solution at this moment, do not install the oct2mat package when you install octave with octave-forge packages if you do not use this package. One one of different solutions is to execute
pkg rebuild -noauto oct2mat
at the octave prompt and then restart octave. The operation results in the oct2mat package not to be auto-loaded in startup. When you want to use oct2mat, execute “pkg load oct2mat” command.

(via octave-forge, via octave-bugs)

ImgBurn for Windows is Excellent

Here is a great disc-burning application for MS Windows called ImgBurn. Works great “out of the box” and is free, which doesn’t reflect its utility or value at all.
I will only share additionally that I’ve tried two free and two commercial application, which I won’t name for fear of any publicity that it would generate for them, that ultimately would fail due to pretty simple scenarios like a disc not being loaded in the disc-drive.