Just a few months ago, I posted about the blogs on MATLAB Central. There were 4 blogs about MATLAB: Doug’s Pick of the Week, Inside the MATLAB Desktop, Loren on the Art of MATLAB and Steve on Image Processing.

All those blogs are quite good, but it was too much attention for MATLAB itselft and nothing specific for Simulink. This injustice no longer exists. there’s a brand new exclusive Simulink Blog: Seth on Simulink (http://blogs.mathworks.com/seth/). I recommend it for all who uses this powerful but not worthly explored simulation tool (I think most people strangely prefers coding rather than connecting blocks!).

Yahoo! Pipes and Widsets Widget for MATLAB Central Blogs were updated. Check it out:

Many creative and interested MATLAB files are posted on MATLAB Central. This week, I knew one extremely useful for those who use MATLAB to handle mathematical models for analizing stock quotes behavior and forecasting: Historical Stock Data downloader posted by Josiah Renfree. It makes possible to download stock data from Yahoo! Finance website straight to MATLAB workspace by a simple command line.

For example:

stock = hist_stock_data(‘01012007′, ‘08022008′, ‘PBR’);

Returns date, open, high, low, close, volume, and adjusted close price adjusted for dividends and splits of Petrobras ticker on NYSE between the dates given.

It’s also possible to retrieve multiple ticker information at once, and even to read a file with a list of symbols desired. Yahoo! Finance provides data from other Stock Exchanges than NYSE: NASDAQ, Bovespa, London Stock Exchange and others.

To make my own analysis – before using it – I used to go to financial websites, copy the historical data, paste in a spreadsheet and only than export to MATLAB variables. Because of this hard work, the mathematical models were only fed by a few selected tickers. But now, I can scan the whole spectrum of stocks and select the best ones based on my criteria. It really makes the analysis much easier and more comprehensive.

Although there are many sites, blogs and other resources about MATLAB on the web, one is worth be the frequently accessed by users: MATLAB Central, an official exchange area for users community. Inside, there are 4 blogs I like:

• Loren on the Art of MATLAB: Loren Shure works on design of the MATLAB language at The MathWorks. She writes here about once a week on MATLAB programming and related topics.

• Doug’s Pick of the Week: Doug is an Application Engineer at The MathWorks. A MATLAB user since 1994, he gets paid to live, eat, and breathe MATLAB! Each week, he highlights a submission from the File Exchange that he finds useful or interesting.

• Steve on Image Processing: Steve Eddins manages the Image & Geospatial development team at The MathWorks and coauthored Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB. He writes here about image processing concepts, algorithm implementations, and MATLAB.

• Inside the MATLAB Desktop: The MATLAB Desktop team, comprised of eight developers, builds the main user interface for MATLAB, including the Command Window, the Editor, and the Current Directory browser.

Using pipes again, I decided to join the four feeds (what also includes some podcasts) into one:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/dilsonlira/matlab_central_blogs

If you use Netvibes, add it to your page:

To get this feed into your mobile phone, I also created a WidSets widget: