A good cross-platform text editor

I use both Linux and Windows and have been searching for a good cross-platform text editor for a long time. Now this small piece software called "MadEdit" seems to be very promising. It is cross-platform, unicode enabled, free, and open source. Check it out at:

http://madedit.sourceforge.net/

A good new book on Monte Carlo methods

Title: Simulation and Monte Carlo: With applications in finance and MCMC
Author: J. S. Dagpunar
Publisher: Wiley

This new book seems really cool and I will try to remember to buy it next time I visit US.

http://as.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470854952.html

Maple, a good tool to teach maximum likelihood method

The new Maple has very convenient tool built-in to demonstrate the process of maximum likelihood estimation in an intuitive way. Unlike software like Stata, SAS, or Matlab, where the computation is done numerically under the surface, Maple solves the problem analytically with the whole process showing up on the screen. This way, students can clearly see what is happening: how to get log likelihood function, how to solve it , what the Hessian matrix looks like, etc.

Very good teaching tool.