Computer vs human memory

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Jerome
Human_vs_Computer

Original blog illustration by Cali Rossi

Memory management is an essential skill that every programmer develops over time. To develop that skill you need to have a sense of how computer memory works. Surprisingly,  memory is not a simple thing. It is actually quite complex and only a few experts actually understand all of the details. In this post, I make an analogy between computer and human memory to explain the basics of both. This leads me to dive into the core of both computers and human minds as these are deeply intermingled.

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Posted in Beginners, Various | 8 Comments

Making interfaces WITHOUT guide

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Jerome
Interface without a guide by Cali Rossi

Original blog illustration by Cali Rossi

You know that feeling, I am sure.  You know that you should learn this thing, that your current set of knowledge is limiting what you can do, that it will be so much easier once you have learned it. Still you are comfy in your current set of skills. Your brain is the lazy culprit. If you know what I am talking about, STOP that and STOP using the GUIDE to make interfaces in Matlab. It’s time to jump ahead and do the real thing. Trust me, I have been there. Read on and fly…

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Posted in Intermediate, Making interfaces | 3 Comments

Using pointers in Matlab

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Jerome
et3

Original blog illustration by Cali Rossi

Before we move back to Matlab, I am very happy to announce, for the new year, that Matlabtips.com got itself a professional illustrator. We are now well equipped to fulfill our mission : Make learning Matlab easy and entertaining. Among my resolutions for new year, there is one to make tons of new posts (illustrated this time with original drawings!).

As I discussed already several times, Matlab has supposedly no real equivalent to the C pointer available to you. This is so due to a design choice from Mathworks. The entire language is organized to avoid pointers. Even so, there are occasions where a pointer is really what we need, like when you are dealing with very large datasets that take nearly the entire memory. In this post, I first introduce you to the world of pointer and then shows you how to use them in Matlab for real.   Continue reading →

Posted in Advanced, Optimizing your code | 13 Comments

Child swapping

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Jerome

photo-manipulation-parents-children-swap-head-paulripke (13)Today I am going to present a technique that I have used extensively to deal with figures. I have never seen it named before or even presented anywhere on the web so I decided to call it “Child Swapping” (edit : Yair from Undocumentedmatlab rightfully pointed out that this technique is often called re-parenting. I like my own name too though so I kept the post title). I believe this technique is very useful when you have to manipulate figure windows, reuse them in a different context or concatenate them together. So if I managed to tickle your curiosity, read on. Continue reading →

Posted in Advanced, Making interfaces | 3 Comments

Structure, cell or both?

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Jerome

In this post, I talk about the two heterogenous containers that are available to you in Matlab, the structure and the cell. I explain when you probably want to use one or the other and when you probably should not. As often, I end with some ideas for little more advanced programmers on how to combine cell and structures together.

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Posted in Intermediate | 5 Comments

Update on the first presentation of SpikeE

Posted on October 20, 2012 by Jerome

I want to thank all that attended our Poster in New Orleans. It was fantastic to feel that our enthusiast for SpikeE was shared among so many labs.  I set up a mailing list to keep anyone update on the development of SpikeE. It is a google group. Anyone is free to join. I am looking forward to see how SpikeE performs and realize this vision of a plateform to easily share code between programmers and non-expert users in many labs.

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Presenting SpikeE

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Jerome

This is a post for all Neurosciences folks that are attending the Society for Neuroscience 2012 meeting at New Orleans. I (along with some of my lab colleagues) will be presenting SpikeE (SpikeExtractor) over there. SpikeE is a general Matlab framework to perform data analysis on imaging data. But it is also a complete developing environment for Matlab programmers to develop elementary pieces of computations that can be batch process on large datasets. It provides all the tools to only focus on your particular computational task and forget about developing all time consuming steps (like data loading, saving or visualization).

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