-אני מגייס מתכנת/ת מטלב מנוסה לעבודה בתל אביב בחברת הייעוץ שלי. המשרה בהיקף ובימים/שעות גמישים, העבודה מעניינת והשכר טוב. לפרטים נא לפנות ל
altmany at gmail

In the Expo, my presentation will discuss a professional pairs-trading and analysis application developed for a New York hedge fund. This application analyzes large amounts of data relatively quickly, and presents the results in a professional-grade GUI. My aim is to use this example to show that contrary to a widespread mis-conception, Matlab programs can be made professional-looking without sacrificing performance (speed), and that coupled with Matlab’s recognized benefits (rapid app development and off-the-shelf functionality) Matlab is certainly relevant for serious user-facing applications, not just for prototyping and internal organizational use. I will discuss some of the technical challenges encountered during the development, and show some simple techniques that can be very effective for improving run-time performance and visualization quality.

If you are in the München area between May 9-11 and wish to meet me to discuss how I could bring value to your work, then please email me (altmany at gmail). We could meet either at the Expo, or in a dedicated (private) meeting.

Update May 6, 2016: Here are the presentation slides.
Update June 30, 2016: The presentation video (32:45) is now available on the MathWorks website.

Presentation video (32:45)

אני מגייס מתכנת/ת מטלב לעבודה באזור פתח תקוה / בקעת אונו. המשרה בהיקף ובימים/שעות גמישים, מתאים לסטודנטים ולמשרה חלקית. העבודה מעניינת והשכר טוב. אני לא מחפש מומחי מטלב, אבל כעבור זמן מסויים של עבודה איתי אתם תהפכו לכאלו. לפרטים נא לפנות בדוא”ל ל
altmany at gmail

I started this blog back in 2009, expecting the website to become just another a niche blog with a few geeky followers. 300 posts, 2800 reader comments, and 800K unique visitors apparently prove that Matlab’s advanced/undocumented features are important to a large portion of Matlab users. My pipeline of future articles continues to grow along with all other measurable quantities of website traffic.

Stats for nerds (and potential advertisers…)

Interest in this website grows steadily, continuing the trend from past years. To date, 794,000 unique readers, in 1.4 million visits, have read 2.5 million pages. The site’s audience grew, reaching over 11,000 unique visits (plus ~2000 RSS and email subscribers) per week. These figures are up about 40% from last year, a solid growth rate that keeps surprising me. In the following graph, the traffic dips are due to the annual December holidays. The growth trend is quite evident:

Steady readership growth (click for details)

At the current rate, sometime in 2015 this blog will pass the million-visitors mark. How significant are the absolute numbers? I believe that my 2012 analysis still remains valid, so please refer there.

2014 in review

In 2014, I published 40 articles, including:

• several posts on customizing Matlab GUI: using an animated busy (spinning) icon, setting Matlab callbacks for Java events in R2014a, using Java GUI in deployed Matlab apps, using a CheckBoxList, customizing listbox/combo-box items and customizing combo-box popups.
• several posts on Matlab’s new graphics engine (HG2): axes properties part 1, 2, 3 and 4, transparency & color gradient of plot lines and plot markers.
• a few posts on undocumented aspects of the standard HG system: transparency of uicontrols and uipanels, taking figure/axes screen-captures, button uicontrol highlighting, customizing bar plots and property value change listeners.
• several posts on Matlab-Java aspects: assessing Java object size in Matlab, Java class access pitfalls, checkClass, using a CheckBoxList and using Java GUI in deployed Matlab apps.
• several posts on integration with external libraries: integrating Plotly charts in IPython Notebook and JSON-Matlab integration.
• during 2014, MathWorks have improved the appearance of their blogs section and added a new Matlab Examples section. I also wrote on Matlab’s new online edition.
• a couple of other posts, on serializing/deserializing Matlab data, workarounds for non-Latin strings, the undocumented features list and class-object tab completion.
• multiple performance-related articles: Improving Simulink performance, using multi-threading in Matlab (part 1, 2, 3 and 4), parallelized Matlab (standard and using memcached), uicontextmenu performance, function-call timeline profiling and the savezip utility.
• last but not least, a post on my new book, Accelerating MATLAB Performance. This book took me two years to write and another year to prepare for publication, and I’m really proud of the result.

As can be seen, quite a few posts deal with performance, which is one of my favorite topics, and the topic of my latest book. I expect to post more articles on this topic in 2015.

Writing a well-researched article takes time and effort. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able in 2014 to keep the pace of a weekly article from past years, as you can see from the summary list (Archives) on the right. I hope I’ll be able to do better in 2015. There’s no shortage of material, only too few hours per day and too few days per week…

Guest bloggers

2014 continued the trend in previous years of hosting articles by guest bloggers:

• Robert Cumming wrote about uicontextmenu performance and transparency in uicontrols.
• Andrey Dimitrov showed how to integrate Plotly charts in IPython Notebook.
• Mark Mikofski discussed using memcached for inter-Matlab data transfer.
• Karthik Ponudurai explained how to use pure Java GUI in deployed Matlab applications.

If you have any Matlab topic with an undocumented twist, I will be happy to post your contents here as well. Don’t be shy – email me (altmany at gmail) and I’ll help with the details.

Plans for 2015

I plan to continue posting about undocumented aspects of Matlab. Specific plans include additional articles on HG2 and performance aspects. I also hope to cross out additional items in my TODO list. Two long-overdue mini-series that I hope to get around to, are about Matlab-database connectivity and Matlab’s new toolstrip/ribbon.

Concurrently with the posts, I will continue to provide professional Matlab consulting and contract work for clients. If you have an interesting project that could use professional Matlab programming, please let me know.

In addition, I plan to develop commercial connector products to a couple of online services. My IB-Matlab product (connecting Matlab with Interactive Brokers) is very popular and I hope to have time to release other similar products.

Training

Finally, I plan to continue providing advanced Matlab training courses/seminars. During the past year I provided customized on-site training courses in multiple locations, including Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Israel and USA.

If you are dealing with any advanced Matlab programming (if you read this blog then you probably do), consider inviting me for custom on-site training to improve your team’s capabilities. This is a unique opportunity to enhance your Matlab skills in a few days, at an affordable cost, by an established expert. If you have a specific topic that you would like me to discuss, then I would be happy to do it. In other words, I can customize the training to your specific needs, within the provided timeframe. Such advanced training is not provided anywhere else, and you’d be surprised at how cost effective this could be. If you are interested, please email me (altmany at gmail) for details.

Happy 2015 everybody!

– Yair Altman

• July 22-24: Minneapolis, MN
• July 25-27: New York City, NY
• July 28-31: Boston, MA
• July 31: New York City, NY

I will be happy to meet you at any of these locations to discuss how I could bring value to your Matlab programming needs, as a consultant, contractor or trainer.

If you would like to schedule a face-to-face meeting, please email me.

I started this blog nearly five years ago, thinking it would be nice to post about a few dozen undocumented features. I had no idea whether this material would be of any use to Matlab users, and I expected the website to become just another a niche blog. In fact, I was not sure that at a rate of one article per week I would have enough content for more than a year or two.

250 posts, 2000 reader comments, and 500K unique visitors later, it is obvious that I underestimated the impact that this blog would make. My pipeline of future articles continues to grow along with all other measurable quantities of website traffic.

Stats for nerds (and potential advertisers…)

Interest in this website still grows steadily, continuing the trend from the past years. To date, 514,400 unique readers have read at least one article here (two on average), in almost a million different visits, reaching over 8000 unique visits (plus ~2000 RSS and email subscribers) per week. These figures are about 60% up from last year, so the upward trend continues although at a slightly lower pace than previously. In the following graph, the traffic dips are due to the annual December holidays and the site-overhaul in 2011. The growth trend is quite evident:

Steady readership growth (click for details)

How significant are the absolute numbers? I believe that my 2012 analysis remains valid, so please refer there.

2013 in review

In 2013, I published 47 articles, including:

• several articles on undocumented aspects of MCOS – Matlab’s class object system (accessing private objects, object creation performance, specifying class property types, property access performance)
• several performance-related articles (sprintfc internal function, memory allocation performance, save performance, fwrite performance)
• several articles on 3rd-party plotting libraries (Waterloo, Waterloo #2, Plotly)
• several articles on integrating other useful external libraries (JGit, JTattoo, Matclipse)
• a few articles on undocumented aspects of interfacing to external software (undocumented MEX API, using Java 7 in R2013a and earlier, Matlab-latex interface)
• a few articles on Matlab’s internal math processing engine (BLAS/LAPACK/FFTW, sparse data, numerical gotchas)
• a couple of posts on customizing Matlab figures (toolbar/menubar, toolbar background color)
• several posts on customizing Matlab GUI (displaying animated GIFs, solving GUI hangs, internal Matlab bugs and workarounds, rich-contents log panel, editbox customizations, editbox real-time data validation, editable combo-box, complex professional combo-boxes, listbox layout)
• several posts on self-contained utilities that can significantly improve GUI appearance/functionality (uiinspect, propertiesGUI, treeTable)
• several posts on undocumented Handle Graphics (HG) aspects (default values, input args interface, Behavior property/functionality, ishghandle‘s extra input arg, draggable data-tips, and a very detailed review of the upcoming HG2)
• a few posts on undocumented aspects of the Matlab desktop (yet another command-window text color hack, Variables Editor scrolling)
• a couple of other articles, on parsing mlint (Code Analyzer) output and function-definition meta-info.

As can be seen, quite a few posts deal with performance, which is one of my favorite topics, and the topic of my upcoming second book, MATLAB Performance Tuning, which I hope to publish this autumn. I originally planned to publish it in early 2014 but research has steadily tripled the book size, from the envisioned 250 pages to nearly 800 (the CRC webpage still reflects the lower page-count). There’s a ton of new material in there, and it took me time to process and write. Anyway, I expect to post more articles on this topic in 2014.

Guest bloggers

2013 continued the trend in previous years of hosting articles by guest bloggers:

• Malcolm Lidierth wrote about the Waterloo graphics library beta and animation + web deployment.
• Chris Parmer wrote on the Plotly graphics library‘s new Matlab interface.
• Chris Albert wrote about Matclipse – the open-source Matlab plugin for Eclipse.
• Mark Mikofski wrote about integrating Matlab to the open-source JGit source-control repository.
• Yaroslav Don wrote on the Matlab-Latex interface.
• Pavel Holoborodko wrote about some undocumented MEX API functions.
• Oleg Komarov wrote on controlling scrolling in the Variables Editor.
• Roderick (who wishes to remain anonymous) wrote about retrofitting Java 7 on R2013a and earlier.

I am very pleased at the growing list of guest bloggers. If you have any Matlab topic with an undocumented twist, I will be happy to post your contents here as well. Don’t be shy – email me (altmany at gmail) and I’ll help with the details.

Public events

In 2013 I was graciously invited by MathWorks and its country representatives to speak at 4 public events, of which I attended three. All events focused on my recent work on Matlab applications for finance and trading. I presented a real-time trading demo in two physical and one virtual Matlab conferences. Interested readers can see a recorded webinar of the presentation. Note that my participation in the MathWorks events does not constitute any official endorsement by MathWorks for my work. I would like to think that it at least acknowledges that I provide some benefit to the community by showing how Matlab can be used for real-life trading applications.

Plans for 2014

I plan to continue posting about undocumented aspects of Matlab. Specific plans include the much-overdue article on checkClass (this is a promise from last year that I failed to deliver, sorry…). I also hope to cross out additional items in my TODO list. Two mini-series that I hope to get around to, are about Matlab-database connectivity and Matlab’s new toolstrip/ribbon (again undelivered promises…).

Concurrently with the posts, I will continue to provide professional Matlab consulting and contract work for clients. If you have an interesting project that could use professional Matlab programming, please let me know.

Training

Finally, I plan to continue Matlab training courses/seminars. The upcoming event is in London in March 10-14. I plan two separate courses:

• Advanced Matlab Programming – 2 days (March 10-11), including best practices, preparing professional reports and performance tuning. US$ 999 until Jan 27, 2014; US$ 1199 for later registrations.
• Advanced Matlab Visualization & GUI – 3 days (March 12-14), including advanced visualization and GUI techniques. US$ 1499 until Jan 27, 2014; US$ 1799 for later registrations.

This is a unique opportunity to enhance your Matlab skills in a few days, at an affordable cost, by an established expert. This training is not provided anywhere else. If you have a specific topic that you would like me to discuss, then I would be happy to do it. In other words, I can customize the training to your specific needs, within the provided framework. Additional information on the London courses can be found here; general details on my training can be found here.

If you are interested in the London courses or a private dedicated course, please Email me (altmany at gmail dot com) for details.

Happy 2014 everybody!

– Yair Altman

I will be very happy to meet you and discuss how I could bring value to your needs, either financial-oriented or not. We can meet at the conference, or elsewhere in NYC on other days: Tuesday (May 21), Wednesday (May 22) or Friday (May 24). If you would like to schedule a meeting, please email me.

Matlab Computational Finance Conference

The Matlab Computational Finance conference is an event that takes place more-or-less annually, in different locations. In 2012 it was held in London; in 2011 it was virtual (online). This year it will be held in New York City on May 23, at the Marriott Marquis hotel, located in midtown (1535 Broadway, next to Times Square).

The free, full-day conference showcases real-world examples of how financial organizations use Matlab to develop risk, trading, investment management, and insurance applications. Highlights include:

• Customer presentations from leading industry practitioners in trading, risk, valuation, portfolio analysis, insurance, and regulatory compliance
• Master class tutorials delivered by senior MathWorks engineers to enhance your understanding of Matlab features and functionality
• Panel discussion with senior Matlab developers
• An opportunity to network, exchange ideas, and discuss challenges and successes with industry peers and Matlab experts
• And naturally, my presentation, slated for 16:50 (I suggest rechecking the agenda close to the conference, to ensure that the time-slot hasn’t changed)

Here is the abstract of my presentation:

MATLAB has traditionally been used for analyzing data off-line, presenting analytic recommendations that were then acted-upon manually. However, MATLAB supports direct interface with data feeds and online brokers, as well as the ability to present sophisticated graphics and user interfaces – all in real time.

This presentation will demonstrate an end-to-end demo trading system in MATLAB, highlighting MATLAB’s potential as a platform of choice. Interactive Brokers will be used to demonstrate live market data feed and account/portfolio input, as well as for sending trading orders to the market. The system’s user interface (GUI) showcases MATLAB’s hidden visualization and interactivity potential, for tracking order executions and charting financial time-series in real-time. Some best-practices for improving real-time performance shall also be discussed.

If you are interested in any aspect of computational finance, you will surely find some interesting presentations at this conference. So if you’re in town, I urge you to attend (hey – it’s free and I hear there’s drinks…). You can register here. If you can’t attend in person, you will be able to see recordings of the proceedings on the conference website some time later.

I started this blog nearly four years ago, thinking it would be nice to post about a few dozen undocumented features. I had no idea whether this material would be of any use to Matlab users, and I expected the website to be a niche blog at best. In fact, I was not sure that at a rate of one article per week I would have enough content for more than a year or two.

200 posts, 2000 reader comments, and 300K unique visitors later, an admission should now be made that I hugely underestimated the impact that this blog would make. In fact, my pipeline of future articles is now longer than ever (a full year long), and the readership growth appears to quickly approach the physical limit of total Matlab community size.

2012 in review

In 2012, I published 50 articles, including:

• a few posts about integrating 3rd-party Java libraries in Matlab (Waterloo, Groovy, JFreeChart, Java Collections)
• a mini-series about customizations to figure window menus (part1, part2, part3)
• a mini-series about customizations to the built-in Matlab profiler
• a few articles about customizing the Matlab desktop (editor, mlint failures, trapping warnings, Command Window bold text)
• many articles about Matlab’s built-in Java and its usages
• several articles on Matlab’s internal memory (leaks #1, leaks #2, profiling, in-place editing, internal format, preallocation, resizing, optimizations)
• a few articles on compiled (deployed Matlab applications (speed-up, splash window, privacy, disabling menu-items)
• quite a few articles about miscellaneous undocumented Matlab topics:
  • GUI (using spinners, uicontrol images, uitable headers, ScreenCapture utility)
  • graphics (Waterloo, JFreeChart, axes tick labels, scatter plot jitter, pinning annotations)
  • I/O (xlsread, xlswrite, urlread)
  • external interfaces (actxserver), etc.
• last but not least, a few posts dealing with performance, which is one of my favorite topics. In fact you will be reading quite a bit more on this in 2013. This is perhaps the place to announce that I am currently writing my second book on the subject of Matlab Performance Tuning. I hope and expect it to be published later this year, and I will of course inform when it is finally published.

2012 continued the trend in previous years of hosting articles by guest bloggers:

• Malcolm Lidierth wrote about integrating Waterloo and Groovy. Malcolm’s Waterloo mini-series quickly became a super-star in terms of readership, facebook likes, and user comments.
• Donn Shull wrote about extending Java classes using UDD. Donn’s series of UDD articles is one of the website’s most highly searched-for terms.
• Alexander Mering wrote about disabling menu items in deployed applications.
• Jim Hokanson wrote about extending the built-in urlread function.
• Peter Li wrote about the internals of Matlab’s memory and mex in-place editing.

Stats for nerds (and potential advertisers…)

Hopefully there was enough material and diversity in there to satisfy different audiences. Judging by the traffic on the site, this appears to be the case indeed. Interest in this website still grows steadily, continuing the trend from the past years. To date, 305,500 unique readers have read at least one article here (two on average), in over 560,000 different visits, reaching a new peak of over 7000 unique visits (plus over a thousand subscribers) per week just before the December holidays. These figures are nearly double those from last year. RSS and email subscription has also continued their steady growth pace. In the following graph, the traffic dips are due to the annual December holidays and the site-overhaul in 2011. The growth trend is quite evident:

Steady readership growth (click for details)

How significant are the absolute numbers?

Well, Matlab reportedly has “more than 1 million” users worldwide. So 305K readers represents about 30% of the total, as an upper bound. Granted, some of those visitors are innocent googlers who happened to stumble across the website and are not Matlab users. But I think we can safely assume that at least half of the visitors, who have visited the website multiple times, are actual Matlab users. Whichever way you look at it, this represents a significant portion of the total Matlab community. Somehow, despite having no investment in marketing, and (naturally) no active support from MathWorks, this website has reached wide-spread community attention. I can’t fully express how happy I am about this. I take it as a resounding community approval, so I intend to continue expanding the site with additional interesting content.

In the past 2 annual perspectives (2011, 2010) I have shown the readership breakup by country and by city. The relative trends that were presented then are still valid. So this time I will display the breakup of the top reader languages, as reported by their browsers. It seems that over two-thirds of you readers speak English (or at least, your browsers do), with German, French and Spanish coming far behind:

Steady readership growth (click for details)

Plans for 2013

In 2013 I plan to continue posting about undocumented aspects of Matlab. Specific plans include the much-overdue articles on uiinspect and its close relative checkClass (this is a promise from last year that I failed to deliver, sorry…). I also hope to cross out additional items in my TODO list. Two mini-series that I hope to get around to, are about Matlab-database connectivity and Matlab’s new toolstrip/ribbon.

There will also be more articles by guest bloggers. I am extremely pleased at the growing list of guest bloggers. If you have an idea for an article, please email me (altmany at gmail).

Finally, last year I started presenting Matlab training courses/seminars, a niche that I hope to expand in 2013. I expect that you will hear more about public events, and I will also continue custom training.

Happy 2013 everybody!

– Yair Altman

My training courses can help you and your team achieve a much higher level of proficiency and efficiency using Matlab. You will quickly learn how to produce higher quality, better looking, faster working, and more robust applications. Your effectiveness in writing Matlab programs will improve, saving you development time while improving the quality. And all this at the convenience of your offices, and at a very competitive cost.

Some of the structured training courses offered include:

• Matlab fundamentals (2 days)
• Professional Matlab (2 days)
• Matlab performance tuning (1 or 2 days)
• Matlab data visualization (1 or 2 days)
• Advanced Matlab GUI (1 or 2 days)

The training course will be customized based on your specific needs, in terms of both the training level (introductory to advanced), the topics and the duration, giving you the best value for your training investment.

For more information, please refer to the new training page on this site, or click the “Training” tab on the website header.

The new training service complements my existing services for consulting and contract development.

For more information, please feel free to email me (altmany at gmail dot com) directly.

^(*) the regular flow of technical articles will return next week

I started this blog three years ago, with an article on changing Matlab’s Command Prompt colors, shortly followed by an article on my cprintf utility, which to this day is still the most popular article on this website. cprintf is also one of my top-downloaded utilities, second only to findjobj, and closely followed by officedoc and uiinspect.

In 2011, I published 47 articles, including:

• Donn Shull’s series on UDD
• a few posts about integrating 3rd-party Java libraries in Matlab (JFreeChart, JGraph, JBoost)
• a mini-series about things that can be done to figure windows (minimization/maximization, disabling, transparency, blurring, docking)
• some articles about internal built-in Matlab GUI controls (plot-selection, color-selection, tri-state checkbox)
• a few posts dealing with performance, which is one of my favorite topics
• quite a few articles about miscellaneous undocumented Matlab topics, ranging from GUI (uitable sorting, multi-line tooltips), graphics (plot data-tips, axes zoom), I/O (reading non-Latin files, formatting numbers), external interfaces (running VB code), etc.
• last but certainly not least, posts related to my work over the past six years – my book about Matlab-Java programming

Hopefully there was enough material and diversity in there to satisfy different audiences. Judging by the traffic on the site, this appears to be the case indeed. Interest in this website still grows steadily, continuing the trend from the first two years. To date, 164,000 unique readers have read at least one article here (two on average), in over 300,000 different visits – more than doubling the figures from last year. In fact, the lowest traffic point of the year, which is customarily around Christmas/New-Year, has had about the same level of traffic this year as the highest-traffic weeks of 2010 (the other dip you see in 2011 is due to a week-long site-overhaul in March):

Steady readership growth (click for details)

RSS and email subscription has also grown at a steady pace. I’m quite proud of the fact that there are more readers/subscribers to this blog than any other Matlab-related blog, excluding perhaps Loren’s. Having felt the pressure and difficulty in writing a fresh weekly post for the past three years, I truly admire Loren’s six years of continuous high-quality blogging.

The top countries from which you readers visit this site remains unchanged from last year’s post. So this year I will show a different angle, of the top cities visiting in 2011: Munich, London, Tel Aviv, Moscow, New York, Paris, Bangalore, Berlin, Zurich and Toronto.

Natick (MA, USA), home of the MathWorks HQ and some 30,000 other inhabitants, has dropped to 12th place in 2011, although it still maintains the #3 position in all-time visits (since this blog was started). Apparently, as this website gets wider recognition by Matlab users, the relative percentage of MathWorkers interested in this blog decreases, although in absolute numbers I can see that MathWorks visits have remained more-or-less constant.

Readers from all over the world (click for details)

In 2012 I plan to continue posting about undocumented aspects of Matlab. Specific plans include the much-overdue articles on uiinspect and its close relative checkClass, as well as additional articles on internal built-in controls. I hope to cross out many items in my TODO list.

There will also be more articles by guest bloggers – I have a growing list of such guest bloggers, of which I am extremely pleased, and some of the promised articles are very interesting. I encourage anyone who has an idea for an article to contact me by email (altmany at gmail, or use the link at the top-right of this page).

Happy 2012 everybody!

– Yair Altman

If you are one of those who have received the book, please be kind enough to write a review of it, in book sites such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

As promised, I will maintain the book’s webpage with an errata list and possibly more information, as they become available.

The question of a new book

As with any birth, the initial exhilaration completely overwhelms, letting me forget how hard it has been to write the book. So while this “high” lasts, I wanted to ask you my readers for your opinion regarding a possible future book.

Which of the following books by me, possibly co-authored with another writer, would you be interested to read and/or have in your library?

1. Professional Matlab application development
2. Professional Matlab GUI
3. Matlab performance tuning
4. Undocumented Matlab – the non-Java parts
5. Some other subject (please specify)
6. None of the above

Please choose only a single item, or prioritize your choices. It will be a book about only one of the above topics, not several topics. I’m not going to write another 700-page monster that takes 5 years to prepare…

There are of course many factors going into a decision about whether or not to enter a book-writing project. It is a multi-year commitment that requires lots of effort, time, focus, and attention to detail. It affects the writer in a way that influences the entire family. In fact, my wife has already voted an emphatic “NO!” on this subject, and I’m pretty ambivalent about this issue myself.

Please do let me know what you think in a short comment. Happy Holidays everyone!

This website was started two years ago, with an article on changing Matlab’s Command Prompt colors. In that article and a few that followed I showed how we can use undocumented Matlab features and functions to achieve stuff that nobody thought were possible. That starting article, with its cprintf followup are still some of the most popular articles on this website to this day.

Interest in this website grew steadily, from several hundred weekly visitors at the beginning, to thousands of unique weekly readers today. To date, 77,000 unique readers have read at least one article here, in some 140,000 different visits. RSS and email subscription has also grown at a steady pace, with about a thousand subscribers today.

Steady readership growth (click for details)

The top visit-origin countries were the United States (quite a few of them from MathWorks headquarters itself), Germany, UK, France, India, Canada, Netherlands, Spain, Israel, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and Australia.

Surprisingly, US visitors only account for about a third of all visits to the website. Apparently Matlab’s use worldwide is more evenly-spread than one would have assumed from the US’s technological dominance. Altogether, readers came from 163 different countries all over the world, including some that surprised me – for example, I did not expect an active Matlab community in Egypt or Vietnam, which came in at #36 and #45 respectively.

Readers from all over the world (click for details)

For the past two years, I have published weekly articles on this website. I have invested many hours of research, testing and preparation of each and every article. Many additional hours were spent answering hundreds of queries that came in as reader comments or emails.

Unfortunately, the financial income from this website has been nearly non-existent. Apparently almost nobody noticed the “Donate” button or the “Hire me” link (many thanks to the few who did).

I plan to continue publishing, but I can no longer justify a weekly article. I will publish at a more leisurely pace from now on, probably once every two weeks or so.

My planned articles for the upcoming weeks include a series of articles about UDD objects by Donn Shull, R2011a (as far as can be done without violating the pre-release NDA), uiinspect, and several additional series on uitable, menu-bar customizations and JIDE components. Additional topics can be found on my TODO page.

Happy 2011 everybody!

– Yair Altman

This is sad news indeed for the Matlab user community. Over the past few years, BlinkDagger has become the largest independent Matlab-related blog (at least that I know of), with some 150 well-written tutorials on a very wide variety of Matlab-related topics. In fact, I believe that only the official Matlab blogs and the Matlab CSSM forum contain more Matlab content. Although there are reportedly over a million Matlab users worldwide, there is precious little independent online Matlab content. Perhaps the need is answered by CSSM and the official blogs, and perhaps the reason is other. In any case, BlinkDagger’s retirement will be well-felt.

As a novice (4-month) blogger I can well appreciate the effort it took Quan and Daniel to write so much well-crafted content, follow-up on numerous comments and continuously think of interesting article ideas. The fact they have succeeded in doing so consistently for so long, without noticeable quality degradation, is remarkable. So, while regretting their action, I can certainly understand it. I truly wish both Quan and Daniel the best of luck in their new adventures, and send them an enormous hug of gratitude for their services to the Matlab community.

Don’t be lazy – be a sport – visit the BlinkDagger link and tell Quan and Daniel that you too appreciate their efforts. Let them leave the stage with a standing ovation rather than a whimper. They deserve it.

Yair Altman