If you haven't tried Arch Linux before, I highly recommend it. The configuration system is excellent, package management is both sane and fast, and the community is amazing (take a look at the Arch Wiki sometime, it is chock-full of good information).<p>The resulting system you get after setting up Arch is zippy, since you know what's running and what's installed. Compare that to Ubuntu, where there are any number of mysterious background processes happening--it's getting as bad as Windows these days.
The highlight of this article for me was the introduction to Gephi, an amazing open-source visualization package. This will be very helpful for generating displays of quantitative information for clients.<p><a href="http://gephi.org/" rel="nofollow">http://gephi.org/</a>