circuit emulators

call me strange, call mewhat ever you want but i do really enjoy fiddling with circuits, simple ones, yes, still. its like a puzzle. also im quite proud of myself. never had anythign to do with circuits or electronics before in my life(seemed to have skipped it at school) and now im enjoying it andhaving fun and even understanding it.

point is this: i wanted to fillde with circuits at home. went looking around, asked questions. tried spice and got put of. its not what i was looking for, its a commandline thingy, to steep a learnign curve i guess, asked some more questions and got told to try SwitcherCad [install & download here] it is a windows programm, yes, but it runs perfectly fine in wine, sans help menu. built a very basic inverting amplifier. worked. yay!

also played with scilab, have to get my brain around these maths programms...they seem so useful. dont want to do numerical stuff in python(well would like to but probably to slow, any good numeric packets around? any computer algebra systems?) or c/c++. c is probably faster but still ugly as hel
reminds me i have to write a c programm to read integers from a file and calculate mean and std deviation or so for uni. bbrrr