The MATLAB tutorial will be held this Friday, 2/8, from 11:00am-12:30pm in room 14-0637.  This tutorial is intended to get everyone up and running on MATLAB (and basic Athena navigation). This review is optional.

Below is a MATLAB self-test. If you are a reasonably skilled MATLAB user, then you should be able to pass this test within 5-10 minutes. If you cannot pass the test, then you should definitely attend Friday's tutorial.

MATLAB SELF-TEST
------------------------
Directions:  Perform the following computations WITHOUT USING ANY LOOPS! If you correctly perform the operations, you'll get a nice 
message  at the end.

Your time begins........ now. Good luck!

0.  add the 6.555 locker (type "add 6.555" at the Athena prompt).

1.  Load the vector "/mit/6.555/matlab/x.mat" into matlab .

2.  Plot this vector, label the x axis "n" and the y axis "Amplitude", and give 
the plot the title "Pseudo-Random Noise Samples"

3.  Create y, a vector that contains the samples of x half-wave rectified. (That 
is, replace all of the negative samples in x with zeros)

4.  Plot x and y on the same plot with a legend telling which vector is which.

5.  Create z which has every other sample of y in it (the first, third, fifth, 
etc.)

6.  Create the vector Done, which contains the samples in z rounded to the 
nearest integer.

7.  Copy the following lines into your matlab window:
      alpha = 'abcdefghiIjklmMnopqrstuvwxyYz!" ';
      alpha(Done)