Earlier this week I returned from Phoenix, Arizona. I go there periodically to visit my father who lives there, but on this particular trip, I did something more. A friend of mine who works with the research group I was involved in during my undergrad (CATEA) published a paper to a conference in Phoenix.
The paper was the continuation (and improvement) of a project I started long, long, ago in 2005. In fact, you can check here for some info about it. This paper was so good that it was worth a free trip for both of us to present it at the RESNA conference.
Of course, I didn’t spend too much time inside, dressed up, talking about papers. I spent most of the trip visiting with my dad and his new wife. We relaxed in the back yard, checked out the pash shopping and dining of Phoenix, and hid from the 115 degree heat!
One day we drove North to a cool town called Sedona which has lots of great hiking and rock formations. Here’s me at the end of ‘Long Canyon.’ It was a nice little 10 mile hike, and where I’m standing in this picture is one of the several “Power Vortices” in Sedona. (I certainly felt more powerful than usual!)
Something that has bothered me for *the entire* time I’ve used it is that when you show images using ‘imshow’ the resulting figure has the image surrounded in a sea of gray border. Well, I hate that gray border. It serves no purpose and today I have figured out how to remove it!
Matlab runs a script called ’startup.m’ when it starts. This is located in your ~/matlab/ directory. If you include this line into that file (or just type it before you make the figure) then you remove the gray border:
>>iptsetpref('ImshowBorder','tight');
Its glorious… Now the picture scales to fill the whole window! (note this only works with the ‘imshow’ command, not ‘imagesc’).
BUT! That’s not all. I also learned about some other cute little tricks that should be included in your startup.m (if you’re me at least).
%removes menu and toolbar from all new figures
>>set(0,'DefaultFigureMenu','none');
%makes disp() calls show things without empty lines
>>format compact;
I feel like these three commands cut a lot of the pointless (inefficient) crap out of Matlab’s default display interface. Thanks to commenter Matt who pointed me toward the set(0,’Default… thing. You can use this to set up *tons* of settings so that you don’t have to set it every time. Just call:
>>set(0,'Default');
For some other useful tips on exporting figures for papers, check this related post.
Recently, I’ve been reading motivational articles by Steve Pavlina. This guy is pretty remarkable (he finished two undergrad degrees in just three semesters!). Now he spouts wisdom about getting what you want out of life. I epically like some of his concepts outlined in these articles:
Overwhelming Force
Cultivating Burning Desire
The Power of Clarity
He makes some very good points about how setting goals and then making very strong and directed actions to accomplish those goals. From reading his stuff I’m getting a big surge of can-do attitude and am eager to try to tackle some goals I’ve been putting off for a while!
Of course, I didn’t spend too much time inside, dressed up, talking about papers. I spent most of the trip visiting with my dad and his new wife. We relaxed in the back yard, checked out the pash shopping and dining of Phoenix, and hid from the 115 degree heat!
One day we drove North to a cool town called Sedona which has lots of great hiking and rock formations. Here’s me at the end of ‘Long Canyon.’ It was a nice little 10 mile hike, and where I’m standing in this picture is one of the several “Power Vortices” in Sedona. (I certainly felt more powerful than usual!)
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