Within the past two years I've discovered something interesting about myself (...actually really, really boring about myself): I can be happily entertained for hours on end setting up my computational environment just right. I find that it gives me a similar type of satisfaction to cataloguing my music collection. I guess you could call it a hobby.

Usually this entails installing the usual suspects (NumPy, Pandas, IPython, matplotlib, etc.) in a python virtual environment. When I'm particularly into it (which is always), I'll also compile the python distribution itself. I've had several opportunities to indulge this pasttime, most recently in setting up my research pipeline on the Flux high-performance compute cluster at The University of Michigan.

Installing NumPy is usually no trouble at all, but for some reason (if you know, please tell me), SciPy has always given me a "BlasNotFoundError" when installing on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distros …