Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

September 28th, 2010

As most of our readers know, MATLAB Central‘s Newreader application allows you to easily read and post from the comp.soft-sys.matlab Usenet newsgroup. About 100 questions are posted to the newsgroup each day. Community members from all over the world respond, helping each other to find new solutions for their MATLAB challenges.

With so many questions being posted every day, not every question gets answered. You can increase the likelihood of getting an answer to your question by a few simple steps.

Before posting your question
Before asking others for help, try looking for an answer online. There are many great resources available to you on MathWorks.com. MATLAB Documentation is a good place to start looking for an answer. Read more about that from Steve’s blog post Documentation for previous releases now available online. You can search product documentation from the current release back to R13SP1. MATLAB Central has lots of ideas. You can search through File Exchange, Newsreader, Link Exchange or the MATLAB blogs for ideas to solve your problem in previous conversations, or you may even find some code samples that relate to your problem. You can easily search MathWorks.com or MATLAB Central using site-wide search.

You can also use a search engine such as Google to look for answers to your question.

Homework questions
If you post a homework question, clearly indicate that it’s homework. Regular readers can recognize problems that look like homework assignments. Clearly show the effort you have put into solving the problem. In general, the regular readers are willing to offer suggestions and help to those who have tried to help themselves; they tend to be much less willing to help people who are looking for others to do their work for them.

Posting a good question
Once you have looked answers on your own, you can now post your question for the MATLAB Community. Just as you would do when asking a question of an instructor at school or a coworker in a work situation, always show respect other community members in your message tone and how you pose the question. Remember that community members are volunteers, helping you in their free time. So be polite when asking for help from others.

When writing your questions, here’s a quick checklist you can follow:

• Use a title that clearly defines your problem area: If others are reading questions, recognizing the area of MATLAB programming will encourage them to click through to your actual question. Titles like “Help needed” are not likely to get you the feedback you are looking for.
• State your question clearly, using reasonably good grammar so the actual problem can be understood. If people cannot understand what your problem is, they cannot help you.
• It’s ok if English is not your primary language. If you want, you can make a note in the beginning of your post so that others understand. Just try your best when writing your question.
• Abbreviations that you use when sending text/SMS messages do not qualify as a good writing style, so please don’t use them in your posts. Write out abbreviations used for clarity.

• Show the code that you have tried so far and any error messages that are generated when you run your code. If you think the problem is data-dependent, include a small dataset so others can reproduce the problem.
• If system configuration details are important, include them as it may help with problem solving. Examples could be MATLAB version, toolboxes installed, operating systems, etc.

After posting

Here are some tips on how to follow-up after you have posted your question.

• Be patient waiting for a response. Not everybody is in the same time zone. Double-posting your question within a short period of time will not get you an answer any faster. Steve Lord had a great post on this subject that is well worth a read.
• If there are clarifying questions from community members who are trying to help you, make sure you clearly respond to the questions asked.
• Show appreciation for those who reach out to help you. Saying thanks and if you have multiple response, letting them know which approach solves your problem, will encourage folks to respond if you post new questions in the future.
• Pay it forward. Become part of our community and join the conversation. Reach out to others who post questions and help them out with their MATLAB programming questions.

There are many references available if you want to read more on this topic – Netiquette by Virginia Shea might be a good place to start. Thanks to Steve Lord for his suggestions on content for this post!

As always, see you online soon!

By Helen Chen

Helen is part of the MATLAB Central team. She spends her days hanging out with really cool folks online at MATLAB Central and at MathWorks HQ in Natick.

12:32 UTC | Posted in Uncategorized | Permalink | 8 Comments »

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8 Responses to “Getting a Response to Your Questions on Newsreader”

1. Ali replied on September 29th, 2010 at 04:53 UTC :
   

   Dear friend

   How are you doing? Hope fine. I have question this time as following in MATLAB/GUI
   I hope that you can help me on this.

   I have my 3 GUI FILES lets name them GUI1, GUI2 and GUI3. My main file is GUI1 when I open it (GUI1). it opens up GUI2. In my GUI3 I have two matrices Let’s say 14 by 6 and 14 by 9. Or pick any ones.

   When I open GUI2 I had to made some change on the matrices in GUI3. Let’s say I have deleted one raw So they became 13 by 6 and 13 by 9. Now my question is How can I save the new matrices in a new m.file that I can recall this new m file, and you can name it GUI4.

   In fact one of my friends had tried some codes but they did not work.

   Sincerely

   Ali Abdalla Abushaiba
   Graduate Student

2. Helen Chen replied on September 29th, 2010 at 18:21 UTC :
   

   Hi Ali – This is a great question for you to post on the Newsgroup for discussion. Why don’t you go to http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/ and try posting your question there?

   Helen

3. matt fig replied on September 29th, 2010 at 18:50 UTC :
   

   Great post, Helen. I would add a few thoughts.

   The best posts will have these features (in my opinion).

   If the question seeks an algorithm or piece of code to accomplish a certain task:
   A small example of typical input and expected output, along with the sizes of the input likely to appear in actual use. The example should include salient features of actual data such as: the data contains all integer values or floating point values, the data contains only positive values, etc.
   If the actual data may contain inf or nan values, this is stated.
   If the actual data is numeric but not of type double, this is stated.
   The priority, if appropriate, given to memory efficiency and execution speed.

   If the question is about how to handle an error message:
   The line of code which produced the error is included, along with a thorough explanation of the variables and non-standard functions seen in the line.
   The complete text of the error message.

   Not all of these features are needed every time, but when they are needed it slows down the process of resolving the issue. If they were included in the first post, a lot of back and forth posting could be saved.

4. Helen Chen replied on September 29th, 2010 at 18:56 UTC :
   

   Thanks Matt! :-)

5. jiro replied on October 1st, 2010 at 02:48 UTC :
   

   Very nice, Helen. It would be nice if there was a link to this post by the “Post a New Message” button. Or at least an abridged list of Do’s and Don’t's may help posters.

   If I’m going to add my 2 cents, I would say when including a piece of code that you are trying to debug, try to reduce it to the minimal code set. Don’t post your 200-line code and say it doesn’t run. Imagine how you would debug your code: you would start simplifying your code until you have the smallest possible code snippet that would reproduce your error. The more you do that, the easier it would be for others to help you.

   It all boils down to showing that you’ve put in some effort in trying to solve the problem.

6. Yair Altman replied on October 1st, 2010 at 10:32 UTC :
   

   I join the crowd in praise, Helen.

   Since the newsreader webpage is entirely at your control, I suggest to add a few optional entry fields that will immediately help posters. For example, fields for “Matlab or relevant toolbox version”, “Operating system”, “problematic Matlab code”. These fields would then be appended to the bottom of actual post message by the newsreader server before being posted on CSSM.

   By adding these fields, most users will immediately adhere to the most important suggestions without needing to read the how-to list. IMHO, it will immediately boost post effectiveness in the majority of cases.

   Of course, not all CSSM posts use the MLC newsreader, but I believe a large majority does. Many users of other clients will soon see the pattern of message-version-OS-code and follow suit in their own posts.

   -Yair

7. Helen Chen replied on October 1st, 2010 at 14:48 UTC :
   

   Thanks Yair and Jiro – Good feedback!

8. Guru murthy replied on October 21st, 2010 at 08:53 UTC :
   

   hello madam,

   I am using mat lab in my academics . I lost some mat files in system and also software will not open properly that is some error message displayed like some mat lab files will be deleted so pl tell me how to get that files and also send me some links for plots

   thanks & regards

   Guru Murthy

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<pre class="code">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.