Practice programming projects

I'm in a period at my job where I'm profoundly underworked and getting quite bored and restless. I do, however, have access to a copy of MATLAB. I can do some programming and scripting and have become good with managing nested loops and such, but I'm far from a pro, and I'm looking to bump up my skills a bit with engaging little side-projects I can do in my downtime.

And so I ask the veteran programmers here, what are some fun little ideas for programming projects I could do to kill some time and bump up my skills a bit? I suppose we could try to throw together a list of little practice projects that'd apply to a general range of programming languages for the betterment of everyone here. Here are two I've done so far in recent days...

--A function to identify the length of a Collatz sequence, used this to make some neat looking plots!
--A simple relativistic spacecraft simulation. Assumes constant acceleration/deceleration between two points some given light-years apart, and extrapolates a true trip time and an apparent trip time due to time dilation. Currently re-working the equations for better machine precision, and so I can also compute the required energy for the voyage, and hence the shear tonnage of antimatter needed.

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I wish I could help, but the only things I could suggest would be ideas for other simulations or models - and since I don't know anything about Matlab specifically, I don't know what would give you the range of specific coding challenges (to give you practice in the areas that will help build your knowledge).

The only reason I'm actually posting in this thread actually is because I've been wanting to try out Matlab myself. How much does it cost?

 

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I used to enjoy messing about with PHP, never even used MATLAB though.

Have you tried it yet? - How is it?.

 

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domesticated om:
MATLAB will cost you one arm, a leg, and your liver, unfortunately. Like, CAD program prices, I'm not sure of the exact numbers or anything but I do know if you want something that's open-source and runs like MATLAB, look into SciLab. Still quite powerful for basic scripts, graphing, etc., and the language is very similar to MATLAB, in fact I think they were trying to rip it off intentionally.

InTheFlesh:
Have I tried what, MATLAB or PHP? Never used PHP, but MATLAB is great fun, no worrying about compiling or anything so everything is very easy to debug, the built-in functions are scary-powerful, and it's a joy to work with! Unfortunately, it's proprietary as hell, which limits it to my work computer.

 

old thread I know, but a good free alternative to matlab that is almost compatible with it is GNU octave. I am using it with some matlab tutorials and I haven't found anything that doesn't work so far.