MATLAB has a lot of built in tools for doing solar radiation calculations. We needed some way to tell the maximum solar radiation that could be received at our sites, so I built this little tool. It's not much, but it has been handy.
To use this, you'll need to reconfigure it to fit a lat and long of your choice. I'd say this is more of a working example of something you can do with MATLAB that you might not be aware of (or ever need).
I heard once that MATLAB is the space shuttle, if other programming languages are cars. This is a case where I'm darn glad to have the shuttle on my side.