Walter Roberson,
Got an email just now asking if there was a good answer to this question. Your one reply is good and helpful, but it has no "accept this answer' button next to it.
I am not going to mark my own stuff as the answer. I can only add a note here to thank you for that code and instructions.
Maybe you know MatLab software development team well enough to have them listen to you, and mention that their email system and the "accept" button writers are not in sync. There are no clear visual clues on this page between the answer and comment and reply items here. I am down here in the "Answer this question" box because there is no other way to add a comment about the whole conversation. Perhaps a generic email format where I could add a subject line to each thing would help. Or a way to add tags and emphasis.
Perhaps they need a generic "like" button for any content on a page. Even inside paragraphs. There is no way to downvote. But popularity and grading by people is not very useful for one-on-one discussions and exlporations. And you really do not know what someone searching on the web (entry from search engines) or someone searching or wandering around looking for help inside MathWorks.com is looking for. Maybe a dialog of some sort.
I tried to generate a billion random integers in an array and had to power off my computer because it locked up my computer. It had no progress bar, and even ctrl-alt-del would not get it to stop. Whoover wrote this was so wrapped up with using the matrix and array form of things, they diminished tools for other things. I remember using LISP and got really good with it, but that never caught on. Powerful functions for things one person or group is working on might not be useful to others. There are a lot of websites that use tags. But the problem is the rigid and linear form of these blogs and dialogs. This discussion here could well be related to many other things on this site, But there is no way to connect and show relations to things here on MathWorks, or to anything on the rest of the Internet.
Even though MatLab is more than 30 years old, I think it is not quite ready yet. Partial answers on the web is not a good way to learn any complex software. It seems all our energies go into just getting tools to do simple things, and the original goals are never achieved.
As a human, I find it hard to talk to strangers, especially ones wearing masks, or hidden. From this page, only a lot of scrolling or leaving this page "might" give me clues. I am reminded of all the 3D video clips I stored that relate to ants moving bits of things around, or termites using spit to glue chunks of nearby things into massive organically fabricated structures. Random swarm algorithms are effective sometimes, but there are many problems they cannot solve.
I see no tools to add anything to MathWorks, and with no clear community or body of knowledge where the options and pathways can be seen and navigated at a glance, I don't think it has much for me. I will keep it on my computer because my friend might want to talk about his work and part of that could be in MatLab.
Ya-Yuan Cheng works at MathWorks. I called to ask a question. He and I talked for an hour and a half. Rather for that long I was trying to describe things that might help MathWorks help more people in the world. All the students in all the schools in the world (about 2 billion people). I would love to redesign the website and the associated processes, and the software and all the applications and data interfaces. But it is so hard to talk seriously about anything in bits and pieces. Either you do the whole thing, or waste time in partial efforts that mostly come to nothing.
Well, this site with its 2.18 million pages doesn't have a way to focus itself on each individuals projects and goals and purposes. I think it could, which is why I said I wanted to recast the whole into a different form, and a different style of interacting with communities - enabled and supported by well crafted and adaptable, intelligent algorithms. (I actually registered IntelligentAlgorithms.org) But I can't build it alone, or by myself. I know it is the right idea and how to do it.
Thanks for helping me with a simple problem. These larger issues I will have to do myself. Or at least try.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation