Child swapping

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?

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

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

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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Using strings in Matlab

Matlab was designed for dealing with numbers, not strings. As opposed to Python, which is an expert at string, Matlab could look sort of limited in this domain. Still you can do many things to manipulate this element. The goal of this post is to introduce you to the usage of strings in Matlab and to help you loosen the knot…

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How to store large datasets?

In this post, I talk about how to store very very large datasets on hard drive. I also talk about some semi-documented features of Matlab storage file, the MAT file and discuss the usage of HDF5 files that can store TeraBytes of data (and more) in a single file.

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Mathworks has listened to our TIFF prays!

A short post for today. Don’t worry, I will be back to this blog soon, I was 120% busy over the summer.

I just want to leave a short note : Mathworks just released a new version of their Tiff libraries to improve performance on all Matlab since 2009b with Tiffs! I don’t know if my post helped but it’s good to be listened! So whoever did this at Natick, thanks!

Fixed versions are available to download here.

Posted in Annoyances, Optimizing your code | Leave a comment