Funny situations while helping others on MATLAB Answers

Just for fun and mostly for those who are here almost everyday, tell us your funny situations (stories).

1. Someone who calls me Paula, not funny for me but surely is for others
2. Someone who is new to MATLAB but almost everyday comes up with something hard to do (I enjoy trying to get those answers)
3. When you answer but someone already answered with exactly or almost the same code
4. When you learn something new while trying to answer a question
5. When you waste your time answering but the person deletes the question (bad joke on us)
6. Those people who post their homework hoping that others do all the work for them
7. Those who just say 'I have a problem' and want us to solve it without any details
8. Unfair accepted answers, I don't care about the reputation but sometimes it takes time and effort to get answers and people accept their own answer, it a bad joke on me.
9. People that change their mind after our answers, I seen people asking for something hard to do and in their comments they ask for something trivial, maybe having fun on us.
10. When you have a question, you edit the text and change the setting for 'Email me when answers are added to this question' be careful because it results on a refresh and you lose the changes to the text, learned that just now, another bad situation to be in but also a bit funny and unexpected.
11. The person who ask a question, we answer it, no thank you and no feedback if the answer is correct but that same person post a comment with another question unrelated to the first one, must think we search engines

All constructive answers get my vote and the best one of this month is the one with more votes :)

Please be polite and don't mention names while describing bad behaviours (jokes on us), lets discriminate in a polite and positive way so we all can have fun.

[Jan]

I started to think about it, after I realized, that more than one user called you Paula.

[Paulo Silva]

I ignored the Paula thing until you said to someone not to call me Paula but yesterday someone came up again with the Paula thing, it's like a really bad joke on me.

[Jan]

"Paula" is a typo or a misunderstanding of the real situation. But a nice women's name is not offending in any way.

[Paulo Silva]

It's a matter of respect for those who try to help.

[Fangjun Jiang]

You covered it very well!

[Carla]

I sometimes search the "homework" and "doit4me" tags just to see how bold people can be with their absurd requests for others to do the thinking for them. I find those very amusing - same for the occasional clever responses of fed-up regular helpers!

[Jan]

@Carla: I could send you a bunch of emails of users, who are not bold enough to publish their homework questions, but dared to send it personally. But most of all they are not bold enough to ask their teachers for help - ignoring the fact, that this would look interested and thirsty for knowledge. If I'm asked for suggesting students for a diploma thesis, I decided for the _most active_ ones - and formulating a detailed question and asking for assistence is a very important activity in a scientigfic research project.

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

This hasn't happened in a while; but I like when someone doesn't catch onto a strung out variable name:

X = your_matrix;
%do stuff with X

OP: I get this error message: ??? Undefined function or variable 'your_matrix'.

[Paulo Silva]

Nice one, next time provide the matrix and the OP says "that's not my matrix" :D

[Oleg Komarov]

facepalm

[Image Analyst]

Hasn't happened in a while? It happened to me just yesterday: "what is array 2D,can u tell oe to from excel" (array2D was the name I chose). I get this kind of thing about every couple of days or so.

Answer 2

[TAB]

The situation in this thread.

Sindia asked a question. I answered the question. Sindia added an answer agreeing with my answer and saying thanks.

I asked him/her (sorry!!) to accept my answer. He/she accepted own thanks giving answer :-).

Answer 3

[Jan]

• The deepest knowledge can be found in the category 7. How cool was "plz give me ful program".
• Walter commented an answer with "neato". Because I'm participating in this forum to brush up my English, I've searched for a translation in the net. I found:

 "neato" is a neato way to say "neat".

• Oleg thought I'm from the Netherlands.
• I got a lot of reputation points by mentioning Matt's 41 GUI examples. It is clear that Matt's reputation does not suffer from this. But it demonstrates the arbitrariness of grading systems.

[Paulo Silva]

There's also the 'send it to my email' and 'urgent', many times they don't even take the time to explain what they want, often I try to find the answer but don't post it.

neato is a cool word, must use it more :)

I think you are german? sorry if I'm wrong

Those 41 GUIs are a classic answer that should be on a sticky question for everyone to see, lots of question could be avoided.

I still don't care about the reputation points but sometimes they frustrate me (bad joke), there are people that accept any answer even those who don't work correctly, others accept none, 90% don't vote, some accept only their own answer.

[Oleg Komarov]

Doh, I thought Dutch comments were German.

[Jan]

@Oleg: You assumed, that I can read Dutch comments. And I replied some irrelevant political statements. After all it was a funny thread. I'm going to tell this story my grandchildren: "And in the year 2011 Oleg had reordered the borders of the European nations..." ;-)

[Andrew Newell]

"Neato" means "I am over 50" (and I should know!).

Answer 4

[Matt Fig]

One of my favorites is when an asker accepts the first Answer given, then continues to ask for endless clarifications. I am reminded of the "never ending stepper motor story" as Walter put it.

There was recently another one of these that stayed near the top for a week, even though it was marked as "solved" (best Answer chosen) within an hour of appearing. I wish I could remember the title, but that was probably a Walter project as well...

My question (answer in the comments I guess): Do you feel somewhat obligated when your Answer has been chosen as best, yet the question is not really finished? I do feel that once someone has chosen my Answer, I am sort of in it for the long haul - and I may feel a twinge of regret when the question wanders far, far away from the original question and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. How about you?

[Sean de Wolski]

To the credit of people who do select the first answer or their own; that button is really close to the text, and you can't undo it. I see how accidents could happen.

[Paulo Silva]

I bet that "never ending stepper motor story" was someone homework or thesis and you guys did all the work for him or her. I don't even enter questions with answers chosen unless it's something very interesting.

[Sean de Wolski]

Whoever tagged the stepper thread with "energizer_bunny" should get a cookie.

[Paulo Silva]

Nice tag but if you read carefully the Guidelines for Editors on MATLAB Answers you find this under Tag Curation

->Remove inappropriate tags.

->Add appropriate tags as needed to facilitate search.

Now makes me wonder if that's considered inappropriate or appropriate or in the worse case it's both and each editor decides what to do or not do

Answer 5

[Fangjun Jiang]

Here is one, rather annoying than funny. Someone never accepts an answer but keep asking questions. I am pretty sure many of the questions are clearly answered.

[Paulo Silva]

that's bad and shows no appreciation for the work of others

Answer 6

[Walter Roberson]

Someone wrote to my email asking for code for a topic. I responded that I was not familiar with the topic. The person responded asking me to "Please ask your friends".

(Some of my friends do amazing things, but none of them would happen to know anything about that particular topic either.)

[Honglei Chen]

This definitely made my day.

[Walter Roberson]

I replied back that the only one of my friends that might know would be the one who is a professional Psychic.

(I've never used his services myself, because "I just might be in there")

Answer 7

[Sean de Wolski]

Paulo, I liked one of your answers to a question; something along the lines of: "How do I write 34.999 to a string?"

You replied with the most common ways:

sprintf
num2str

And then the user replied with: "this doesn't work" when it clearly did. No attempt at even copying and pasting the answer.

[Paulo Silva]

That's one old answer :) I do remember it, now I try to avoid those answers and take my time to provide examples. There are lots of strange people here :D

[Oleg Komarov]

I literally hate this kind of situation and whenever it happens I swear in Italian.

Answer 8

[Jan]

The abbreviation of the personal profile in the list of contributors is sometimes funny:

• Matt Fig: Matt holds a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, and more...
• Mine: Computers assist human, not the other way around. I do not more...
• Sean de: Just finished my MS in structural engineering at the Univers more...
• Fangjun Jiang: A bad day fishing with Dad is better than a good day shoppi more...
• Rick Rosson: Applications Engineer specializing in Signal Processing and more...
• Rob Graessle: I am an application engineer at MathWorks. I primarily work more...
• Brett Shoelson: I'm a biomedical engineer by training, but I love MATLAB and more...

etc. I stop here, but the half of the communitiy seems to be working on or at least interested in more - is assume more than Matlab.

[Fangjun Jiang]

That is no wonder. When I fed my kids when they were babies, I taught them to say 'more'. And they did, which made me happy. I like 'more'!

[Image Analyst]

How about Walter's where he says "I am taking an end-of-year break" when that meant he just went from answering 50 questions a day to 49 questions a day. By the way, he's still on that "end of the year break."

[Walter Roberson]

Fiscal year, fiscal year. ;-)

Someone I know had their work Christmas party last night, January 25th.

Answer 9

[Andrew Newell]

I like this exchange:

Q: hello, please send me the* speech database* for my project titled,"automatic speaker recognition" thanks in advance.

A: Where you have kept your speech database? Is it here?

Answer 10

[Thomas]

The easiest one so far has been..

How to add 1 to each element of array

 c=[2 4 6]

Ans:

 c+1

This from a user who has asked much more complicated questions in the past..

Jan commented that it was probably the shortest answer (Though I know of some 'Yes' 'no' answers..)

Answer 11

[Walter Roberson]

I was emailed a request for "urgent" assistance, but which contained no hint about what the Question was. I did not recognize the name of the sender, and the name on the email turned out not to match any user-name.

(In time I figured out who sent the mail, but I never did figure out which Question they were asking for help on!)

Answer 12

[Walter Roberson]

Always fun is email questions with an empty Subject: line, or a Subject: of "help" or similar titles that are often used by spammers and scammers to draw people in to reading their messages.

I receive several hundred spam (or scam) messages per day, so chances are I have deleted more than one such message unread.

[Jan]

Do you answer questions sent by email?

[Walter Roberson]

I _reply_ to most emailed questions.

The most common reply is that I am not familiar with the topic they are asking about.

Sometimes the emailed questions are interesting. The majority, though, are matters I either do not know about or am not interested in.

The emailed questions that require some thought sometimes get lost to more immediate or easier tasks. If I step away from the computer to sit quietly and work something out mentally, I tend to fall asleep. And if I happen be on a reading binge, it can be somewhat difficult to get my attention...

Answer 13

[Fangjun Jiang]

I had a chuckle when Jan Simon nitpicked me for my improper use of singular and plural. The OP has deleted the question but I found it in Google Cache.

OP about 5 hours ago

i'm having error. in my case i have xi= 0 and 2 and yi= 2 and 4. and i put this one. fprintf('x y %d %d %d %d\n',xi,yi) and i'm having a error. what should i do?

Grzegorz Knor about 4 hours ago

doc fprintf

OP about 2 hours ago

what do you mean doc fprintf?

Fangjun Jiang about 2 hours ago

type 'doc fprintf' in MATLAB Command Window without the single quote. It'll bring up the documentation for the fprintf() function and you'll lean how to use it.

Jan Simon about 1 hour ago

@Fangjun: Do you mean the first or the second single quote, or both quote*s*? ;-)

[Jan]

@Fangjun: I could not resist. At first I decided to translate "I'm having error" to "Matlab is having an error", but I'm astonished each time, when people do not post the error message. At second I thought "doc fprintf" is actually trivial, but if someone needs even a guide of how to use the embedded information, removing "the single quote" must cause serious troubles. Alternatively I thought of replying "doc doc", but I estimated that your humor level is above the OP's one.

[Fangjun Jiang]

At least we can have some laugh sometimes when it's frustrating.

[Daniel Shub]

+1 to "doc doc"

[Walter Roberson]

Is that the one that just writes out the message", "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not an engineer!" ?

[Jan]

No, Walter. "doc doc" is the kernel of the GIGO-pipeline theorem. Try this:

doc doc doc >> ??? Error using ==> doc, Too many input arguments.

But actually Matlab's parser is incorrect and it must be converted to the functional form as:

doc(doc('doc')) >> ??? Error using ==> doc, Too many output arguments.

This proves that output equals input, which is a general case of the above mentioned Garbage-In->Garbage-Out queue.

Answer 14

[Walter Roberson]

• Someone offered to pay me to write an assignment for them, not so long ago. Not to help them with the assignment: to write the whole program. Sigh.
• While looking around the 'net one day, I happened upon a service to do homework for people; the advertisement specifically included MATLAB homework.
• While searching around for information on a topic or on a third-party product, I sometimes find pirated / cracked MATLAB related products (though not MATLAB itself, or not yet.) Or at least so it appears: I really don't think my security people would be understanding if I were to try to visit those sites "just to check".

[Jan]

@Walter: I'm not sure if I can follow you. You have been asked *once only* to solve a homework for money? If so, what do I made wrong? Does my picture look _cheaper_ than yours?

You've found a commercial service for solving Matlab homework, ok. But why is this funny? Because they forget to employ you?

Cheating is a serious business. And there are more evil activities in the net.

There are some Matlab related forums in Iran, but due to the US export restrictions TMW does not sell any products there. I conclude, that these forums *must* concern cracked versions only. And it is easy to find one of this pages by a tiny typo, if you want to get to the Italian MathWorks homepage - even the security staff will understand this.

[Walter Roberson]

Jan, in English, "funny" can also mean "odd" or "unusual" or "strange" or "tainted" or "weird" or even "unexpected". For example, "This milk tastes funny" means that the milk does not taste right, such as if it is starting to go sour.

'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny...”' —Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)

[Jan]

Well, did I mention already, that I participate in this forum to brush up by English? I did trust dict-leo.org too much, which offered 8 translations, but all of them have a high level of humor. But obviously a dictionary cannot replace a living forum. Thanks Walter.

[David Young]

Which reminds me that "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" was a successful 1960s musical. Now we don't travel to get to the forum, so there's less opportunity for funny things.

Answer 15

[Daniel Shub]

I think I have now given close to the simplest possible answer

totalA = A_1+A_2+A_3;

The OP accepted and thanked me for the answer. Had they asked to add two matrices of the same size, instead of three, I think it would have been the simplest question ever asked.

Answer 16

[Jan]

I got this message by email - this is the full text:

 This message was sent to you via your profile page at MATLAB Answers.

 Hey could you just quickly explain how you know the
 code you wrote will process faster? What is the code doing, basically?

Well, I've stated in my profile, that I do not answer questions sent through my profile page. But should I resist to answer here, that I know, that the code is faster, when the processing needs less time? And that the code does not do anything, because it is a code - it is Matlab which does, what the code commands it to do.

I find this funny, because the author of this question surely knows, what he is talking about. The assumption, that I share this knowledge is cute.

Answer 17

[Daniel Shub]

I found a use for the ECHO function. I am not sure if it is funny, but it makes me happy.