MS Fonts in Google Documents on Ubuntu

A major reason why I love google documents is that I can access all the files from any computer regardless of the operating system. In principle this works great for me but unfortunately changing the text font (e.g. to Courier New) doesn't work on ubuntu. Although I still hope there is something goggle can do, the intermediate solution is using the 'Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts':

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

P.S. Don't forget to restart you browser afterwards.

MATLAB/Octave Utils: submat, grouped

Totally forgot to share these two MATLAB/Octave functions I wrote some time ago:
submat: accessing a sub-matrix of an unknown multi-dimensional matrix
grouped: creating record like data structures from arrays grouped by an index cell

Actually, I still wonder if or why this functionality is not part of the core library or even the 'language syntax '? Anyhow, I couldn't find it so I wrote the two functions myself. (please tell me if you know about a predefined equivalent or a better solution)


1. submat ( submat.m )

In Matlab everything is a (potential) N-dimensional matrix of elements such as doubles, cells or structs. Sub-indexing is easy, unless you try to program in a generic way, e.g. with high-order functions. The problem is that traditional sub-indexing requires you to know the element type (cell or not) and dimensions of the matrix. So I came up with a function submat, which basically does sub-indexing in the highest dimension of an unknown type:

A = [ 1, 2, 3; 4, 5, 6 ];
submat(A,2:3) % same as A(:,2:3)
-> [ 2, 3; 5, 6 ]

B = { 'Hello', 'submat'; 'Goodbye', '(:)' };
submat(B',1) % same as B'{:,1}
-> { 'Hello', 'submat' }



2. grouped ( grouped.m )

The other thing I missed was a simple way to group data arrays to structs. Of course this can easily be done within a for loop, but using the group function eliminates the code repetition. Also, it can be be used in two ways:

First, it allows to simply group equal indices together.

grouped( [ 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 3] )
-> { [ 1, 3, 5 ], [ 2, 6 ], [ 4, 7 ] }

So far nothing special, but its main purpose is to create a custom struct array.

%artists = { 'Beatles', 'Bob Dylan' };
%records
record_artist_ids = [1, 1, 2, 2, 1];
% or the result of group(record_artist_ids)
record_artist_ids = { [1, 2, 5], [3, 4] };
title = { 'White Album', 'Rubber Soul', 'Blood on the Tracks', 'Blonde on Blonde', 'Revolver' };
year = [ 1968, 1965, 1975, 1966, 1966 ];

artist_records = grouped ( record_artist_ids, 'title', title, 'year', year)

-> artist_records(1).title = { 'White Album', 'Rubber Soul', 'Revolver' }
artist_records(1).year = [ 1968, 1965, 1966 ]
artist_records(2).title = { 'White Album', 'Rubber Soul', 'Revolver' }
artist_records(2).year = [ 1975, 1966 ]