William's Blog

Keyboard Command to Switch MATLAB Windows in OSX Lion

Tue, 22 May 2012 19:55:16 -0400

I have a MacBook Air and I run MATLAB. I’ve been frustrated by the apparent lack of keyboard shortcut to switch between open MATLAB windows (like code, figures, and command window). In windows this would be equivalent to Alt + Tab.

Sadness no more: hit Cmd + ` (to the left of the 1 key) to cycle forward and Cmd + Shift + ` to cycle backwards.

Hooray!

Magic.

Thu, 17 May 2012 21:49:15 -0400

Magic.

the modern rules of christian care & accountability

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 08:55:42 -0500

the modern rules of christian care & accountability:

derekwebb:

now let’s fire up our computers and smart phones, jump on our favorite niche theology blog or message board and demonstrate the same fearful, judgmental and uncharitable lives that we ourselves have been called to. because remember, whatever you do, even acting like a total ass, you should do it with all your might, as unto the LORD.

Derek Webb's "Feedback" Album is Beautiful.

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 08:50:00 -0500

Derek Webb's "Feedback" Album is Beautiful.

"So then if miracles want to have scientific standing, that is be recognized as genuine facts, they..."

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:20:00 -0500

“So then if miracles want to have scientific standing, that is be recognized as genuine facts, they must sue for admittance at the port of entry to the mainland of scientific endeavor. And admission will be given as soon as they submit to the little process of generalization which deprives them of their uniqueness. Miracles must take out naturalization papers if they wish to vote in the republic of science and have any influence there.”

- Great quote from Why I Believe in God by Rev. Cornelius Van Til, Ph.D. Found via /r/reformed

Who am I?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:19:32 -0500

A person created in the image of Christ … or maybe a very intelligent cat. Not sure.

what is underwater optical communication?Please give me the detailed idea about the same.what is on off keying and why is it required?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:19:07 -0500

Underwater optical communication is a method of communicate data via an optical signal underwater.

On-off keying is a baseband form of digital communication with 1 bit per symbol. The two symbols are a high and low values, which, respectively, communicate a bit ‘1’ and bit ‘0’. For optical signaling, this usually equates to turning off and on the optical source. It’s not required, but it’s convenient and usually has a lower average power than other forms of optical communication (like subcarrier intensity modulation)

Good overview of an exciting field. I hope to dive into this at...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:30:15 -0500

Good overview of an exciting field. I hope to dive into this at my new job at 3 Phoenix Inc.

Sumatra and TeXnicCenter Inverse Search

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:26:35 -0500

What’s the difference between this command:

/ddecmd “[goto(’%f’,’%l’)]

and this one?

/ddecmd “[goto(‘%f’,’%l’)]

In practice, the latter allows you to do a proper inverse search (clicking on the PDF takes you to the relevant section of the LaTeX document for editing), while the former does not.

That little tick mark, ’, is wrong. It should be a single quote, ‘. I don’t even know what it is, because it’s not a single backquote, `. It’s something entirely different that jumped into the command and frustrated me for many hours.

Now you know. Not all quotes are the same.

William Doxford and Sons - SN Guides

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:00:30 -0500

William Doxford and Sons - SN Guides:

The scale of this machine shop is astounding.

"Q: Do you still drink cheap beer? A: I do. I play on an adult hockey league team. And every week..."

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:30:29 -0400

“

Q: Do you still drink cheap beer?

A: I do. I play on an adult hockey league team. And every week it’s one of my teammate’s job to bring a 30 pack of cheap, cold cans of lager. And whatever one it is, whatever brand it is I look forward to having it. There’s nothing like that light lager for refreshing after a hockey game. There’s really not any other occasions in my week where I’m craving that kind of beer. But I’m a beer geek, not a beer snob. And all beer is good. And there’s a time and place for any kind of beer.

”

- Chewing the Fat: Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head: DCist

"Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full..."

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:23:14 -0400

“Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself. Hitler provided full employment with a huge armament program. World War II provided full employment for every nation involved. The slave labor in Germany had full employment. Prisons and chain gangs have full employment. Coercion can always provide full employment.”

- Economics in One Lesson

Setting the Axis of a MATLAB Plot

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:58:23 -0400

I ran into a situation where I was progromatically making a plot and I wanted it to be formatted correctly each time. This saves me effort from having to manually fix aspects of the plot that aren’t set.

The trouble is, MATLAB doesn’t make this particularly easy. There’s lots of figure handles and such that need to be manipulated. Here’s a code snippet that a) creates a figure b) lets you manually set the axis properties and c) plots data on that axis.

figure(2); % Create figure #2. Note this figure does NOT have an axis associated

		% with it. If you call 'hold on' it WILL create a default axis.

axes1 = axes('Parent',gcf,'YScale','log','YMinorTick','on',...

    'YMinorGrid','on',...

    'YGrid','on',...

    'XGrid','on'); % Creates a semilog axis with logarithmic y-axis, etc.

hold(axes1,'all'); % Prevents subsequent plots from changing the axis property

plot(...,'Parent',axes1);  % Plot data on this new axis. I don't think this is strictly

 % necessary, but can help if you have trouble.

So, there you go. Don’t forget you can use the following to add title, labels, and set the axis limits:

title({'Title line 1','Title line 2'},'FontSize',12);

xlabel('X label','FontSize',12);

ylabel('Y label','FontSize',12);

ylim([1e-012 1]);

xlim([1 10]);

MOG Just Sent Me My Plaintext Password

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:38:58 -0400

So there’s plenty of online music streaming services - Pandora, Spotify, Grooveshark … and MOG. MOG just announced their new “free” service so I decided to sign up. Awesome.

All fine and good until I get my confirmation email:

WTF MOG?! You’re storing my password in plaintext?!? Have you ever developed a web app before? Hash-ed much?

Long story short, if you care about security you won’t sign up for MOG.

Mr. Hamilton could stand to break up some sentences

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:39:56 -0400

I’m reading the Federalist Papers. Two paragraphs in, I come across this monster:

The most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

James Madison; Alexander Hamilton; John Jay. The Federalist Papers (Kindle Locations 129-133).

One sentence. Wow.

Hey William, I am writing to you to gain some insight on Underwater optics. Its my final year project though research based I do have model the channel modeling in MATLAB. My question is:

Why to Choose a Laser Didoe than a LED as an underwater optical transmitter?

I would higly appreciate a response. Thank you for your time

Regards,
Rohan Kakade
Student at the University of Nottingham, UK
eexrk4"at"nottingham"dot"ac"dot"uk

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:05:30 -0400

Rohan,

It’s a complicated set of trade-offs. The biggest decider (in practice so far) seems to be the issue of pointing and tracking. This is (more) easy with a LED (or any diffuse source) than a highly colimated source like a laser. It’s up to the system designer to decide whether they want to spend money/power on better pointing and tracking or generating enough optical power with LEDs to transmit the required distance.

Source coherence seems to play little effect (so far) as the scattering from the channel destroys the coherence. You can check out this paper for more reference: http://www.mendeley.com/research/effects-underwater-turbulence-laser-beam-propagation-coupling-singlemode-optical-fiber-2

At Crazy Fire: “Dinner with the Altmans and the Simpsons”

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 17:58:50 -0400

At Crazy Fire: “Dinner with the Altmans and the Simpsons”

I’m at Crazy Fire (Cary, NC) “Dinner with the Altmans and the...

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 17:58:07 -0400

I’m at Crazy Fire (Cary, NC)

“Dinner with the Altmans and the Simpsons”

Follow me on Gowalla

Reading List

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:34:59 -0400

Read recently:

The Hunger Games (series)
Incarceron
The Sparrow
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Beer is Proof that God Loves Us

Currently Reading:

Born to Run
The Dervish House

On the Desk:

American Gods
Game of Thrones

what next?

At Aviator Brewery: “Brew tour”

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 16:31:53 -0400

At Aviator Brewery: “Brew tour”