Course sites at Berkeley, McGill

Have been interested lately in finding good course sites for self-study on computational neuroscience. Found this through Curtis Baker: Neural Computation 298 at Berkeley, by Olshausen (of Field and Olshausen 1996 fame). Very interesting material there, good sample code, challenging assignments, assigned readings, the whole works.

I'm also mentioning in the same breath the site for a class I'm currently taking, Computational Perception (COMP 646) at McGill by Michael Langer. He has some great lecture notes. The vision stuff is particularly interesting. Nothing you couldn't get through reading papers but I find you lack perspective when just reading papers upon papers.

Using command line programs in matlab: disable screen saver during an experiment

PsychToolbox doesn't a function to enable or disable the Windows screensaver, and the screensaver popping seems to crash PsychToolbox. Matlab allows you to run dos programs from the command line, so a quick way to solve this issue is to grab the command line app FlipSS, put it in your experiment directory, and then run this line before Screen('OpenWindow'):

dos('FlipSS /off');

After Screen('CloseAll') or sca you can then run:

dos('FlipSS /on');

...to reenable the screen saver. A lot simpler than a DYI mex file, if you ask me.