Matlab/Octave: imagesc with variable colorbar

Plotting a discrete matrix with a colour map is a common task that one would need in many different fields of sciences. To plot a discrete matrix with MATLAB, a possibility is to use imagesc, while it handles discrete points better then other density utilities, where it can handle (0,0) placement better. However, if there are limited number of values in the matrix entries, you may want to keep only existing ones on the color labels. One way to achieve this is to re-write your 'colormap' via 'jet', that maps existing colours on the current matrix. However, this is not sufficient, you need to re-write your matrix as well. See example code below. So called a variable 'colormap' situation is handled with this approach. (This is tested with MATLAB, on Octave, I think one needs to be careful on 'colormap', values behaviour of 'jet' is little different.)

% bare minimum - example -
clear all
close all
allLevelNames   = {'one', 'two', 'three', 'four'};
levelValues     = [1 2 3 4];
myMatrix        =  [3 3 3 3; 3 3 3 3; 4 4 1 1; 4 4 1 1];
% Now re-write colormap
aV              = length(levelValues);
jj              = jet(aV);
availableValues = unique(myMatrix);
getIndexes      = arrayfun(@(xx) find(levelValues == xx), availableValues); 
colormap(jj(getIndexes,:)); 
% Re-write myMatrix in the availableValues range 
myMatrix = arrayfun(@(x) find(availableValues == x), myMatrix);
% Now  Plot
h    = imagesc(myMatrix);
% Handle if there is more then one color is in use
maxV = max(availableValues); 
minV = min(availableValues); 
if(length(availableValues) > 1) caxis([minV maxV]); end; 
hcb=colorbar; 
set(hcb, 'YTick', availableValues); 
set(hcb, 'YTickLabel', allLevelNames(getIndexes));
set(gca,'YDir','normal') % Not to invert x-y but putting (0,0) on the bottom left 
xlabel('x values');
ylabel('y values (care on (0,0) location from imagesc)');
title({['Variable colormap handling'];['by msuzen at gmail']});

Check URL existance with R

RCurl package provides utilities for HTTP and FTP connection. One particular functionality is checking if a given URL is accessible, implying existence, using url.exists. However some unfortunate Windows users may have difficulty to get its latest build from CRAN. Here is a simple function to check existence of URL by only using R base functionality;

   urlExists <- function(address) {  
     tryCatch {  
      con <- url(address)  
      a  <- capture.output(suppressWarnings(readLines(con)))  
      close(con)  
      TRUE;  
     },  
       error = function(err) {  
       occur <- grep("cannot open the connection", capture.output(err));  
       if(length(occur) > 0) FALSE;  
      }  
    )  
   }  

XML and command line parsing in C++/C

Dynamic languages like python, tcl or alike are taking over in driving many C/C++ codes I/O operations and option parsing due to quick and easy implementation, however it is still possible to use libraries/APIs for parsing options via command line (or XML ) quite efficiently in C/C++. Here is the list of some API/libraries:

• Xerces is Apache's XML parser for C++.
• GCCXML is gcc extention for XML parsing in C++.
• Commons CLI is Apache's command line parsing API.
• Argtable is ANSI C command line parser.
• getop is gnu's commang line parser.
• tclap is templatized C++ command line parser.

Operating in Multiple Repository within ant

Ant script can not change its base directory after it is invoked, for that reason if you are handling two repositories under same directory it would be wise to write a secondary wrapper script.