Tag: computing

Software for visual psychophysics

This site has a nice big list of software for visual psychophysics. It’s very extensive and includes free as well as commercial solutions: visual stimuli, analysis, teaching, hardware, and more.



Virtual desktops on Windows

Virtual desktops are used to manage screen real estate. A user might have a bunch of web browsers open on the desktop, and then hit a key to switch to a nice clean desktop (the…



More MATLAB learning

On the topic of MATLAB learning materials (covered previously here and lots more MATLAB stuff here), MIT has some online courses freely available. Here’s an “aggressively gentle” intro to MATLAB, and…



Synchronizing multiple computers for experiments

In many rigs, multiple computers are used, and they need to talk to each other. For example, one computer handles the…



NEURON + Python in OSX

Post by Christoph Schmidt-Hieber

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Here are some relatively pain-free instructions to get NEURON to run with Python support on OS X.

1. Install XCode 3.x. XCode 4 will not work (*). You…



Rename variables in MATLAB

MATLAB version R2011b has just been released. The new format for error messages is not as mind blowing as you might have heard. However, there’s one cute little function…



MATLAB Mobile 2.0: cloud computing

MATLAB Mobile is a way to use MATLAB from an iOS device. It’s cute, but a bit odd, because you used to need to have MATLAB running on your own server in order…



Proto open source

Ars Technica has a short, but nice article on the US Government’s role in AT&T’s decision to release Unix to a wider…



HDF5 + XML = SDCubes

A paper on data organization just came out in Nature Methods (Millard et al. 2011, commentary by Swedlow et al.). They believe, as do I, that using XML schema to organize…



Another blog added

Xcorr has some nice posts on coding, Plexon systems, analysis, and whatnot. It was just added to the Recommended Blogs section on the right. Some example posts:
A Plexon C++ API on 64-bit…



Data’s killer app

On the topic of the recent app post, I’ve been thinking about an old blog post from Peter Keane. The of his post is, “What is Data’s Killer App?” In it, he pondered the problem of data management.

After a not entirely apt analogy to HTML, Keane suggested that there is no killer app…



Wireless

I recently returned from my private island in the Maldives. Like most of the inhabited islands, it has no physical links…



Hopes for the New Year

Here’s the news Labrigger hopes to see in 2011.

New developments with optical indicators

A new, super bright fluorescent protein that blows the doors off of GFP-based proteins.
Bright, far-red dyes with huge 2p cross-sections.
Higher S:N genetically-encoded…



Software for custom 2p scopes

If you build your own two photon scope, you’ll need software. I mainly use the MATLAB-based ScanImage. Vijay Iyer (Janelia Farm) has really made it a slick, stable program. It cosmetically resembles Tom…



Remote desktop software

From time to time, you might catch me on my yacht, running an imaging experiment by remote desktopping into my rig from my laptop. I would use my iPhone, but I can’t fit all the windows for ScanImage onto the screen, even…