2010-02-25

Angry Birds

I have to make some advertisement for a funny little iPhone game: Angry Birds. The idea: green pigs stole some eggs, now the birds are angry! Use those Kamikaze birds as ballistic missiles to destroy the pigs! Nice physics engine. Also available on the N900, and costs only 79 Eurocents. Here's a shot:




2010-02-22

How to duplicate Matlab functionality

Since I am a total Matlab-n00b, I rather write a convoluted Python script instead of using the appropriate Matlab function. And here it is. A small script to compute the standard deviation of two vectors. I guess this would have been one Matlab command.


import sys
import scipy.io
import math

def computeStdDev(file, vec1, vec2):
data = scipy.io.loadmat(file, struct_as_record=True)
vector1 = data[vec1]
vector2 = data[vec2]
if len(vector1) != len(vector2):
print "Error: Vectors do not have matching lengths."
return
diff = vector1
N = len(diff)

for i in range(N):
diff[i] = vector1[i] - vector2[i]

mu = 0
for val in diff:
mu = mu + val
mu = mu / float(N)

sigma = 0
for i in range(N):
sigma = sigma + (diff[i] - mu)**2
sigma = math.sqrt(sigma / float(N))

print "mu: %f" % mu
print "sigma: %f" % sigma

if len(sys.argv) != 4:
print "Usage: %s file vector1 vector2" % sys.argv[0]
sys.exit(0)

computeStdDev(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2], sys.argv[3])

2010-02-11

Matlab and Python

How to read Matlab files with Python and SciPy can be read here. Short:

import scipy.io

data = scipy.io.loadmat('test.mat')

This will create a dictionary called data containing all the variables of the Matlab file.