Various small fixes and improvements

[chrishavlin]

• Closes #60
• Closes #57
• Closes #56
• Closes #65
• Closes #53
• release history cleanup
• add is_octave function for use wherever needed
• always display skipped tests (they werent displayed if there was a failure)

[chrishavlin]

latest push includes an intentional failure to make sure the more verbose output on failure works in CI