blinkdagger

Recently, we have been getting many inquiries about how to do particular things within Matlab to the point that we are becoming hostage to our readers. Although the sole focus of this blog is to teach others how to do things through tutorials and to cultivate a learning environment with our readers, there are limits to how helpful we can be. We understand that building a strong relationship with our readers is an important aspect of this blog, but we also do not want to be taken advantage of.

If it’s a question that can be answered in a couple of minutes, we don’t mind taking the time to do so. But recently, we have been getting some rather complicated questions that are simply outside the scope of what we do here at blinkdagger.

And because we try to be helpful, we spend too much time helping others, which makes it difficult for us to our everyday activities and what not. So when is “enough”, enough? Where do you draw the line when helping others? I think that this is an issue that plagues many people. It can be difficult to say no to someone in need, but sometimes, you just have to know when to put your foot down. Because if you don’t, you will spend all your time helping others, and you will not be able to get anything done yourself!

Someone We are Likely to Help

If it’s a pretty simple inquiry, we are more bound to help. We check our email pretty frequently, so if you have a quick question that can easily be answered, we respond pretty promptly. Take the following e-mail that we receive from Person A through the contact form:

Dear Quan and Daniel,

Your tutorials are inspirational and have been the building blocks of my early
coding experience in MATLAB. I have recently been assigned the task of creating
an animated projectile trajectory GUI that takes an initial velocity and angle
of fire and displays it on a pair of axes. I have managed to complete this
stage, using simple equations of motion. As such, my code for drag is as follows . . .

When I attempt to implement the code however, MATLAB tells me that the inner
matrix dimensions on the code of line which describes the vertical flight path
are not the same. What would you recommend I do?

The e-mail is well written and it shows us that this person has actually gone through our tutorials. The fact that he starts off his email with a nice compliment makes us more inclined to help as well.

Someone that We Will try to Avoid in the Future

Now consider Person B:

first of all excellent job i have been following your tutorials regularly and have created a gui panel but i am stuck and i need your help regarding this . . . (three more paragraphs of text explaining his problem) . . . also i have encountered another problem could u tell me how i can solve this power series sorry to ask you but actually i am stuck for week i guess software approach is best and also could you help me identifying the series attached as eq.bmp. we have to find the second smallest root correct up to 4 decimal places

After we help with the problems, Person B writes us another email a couple of days later:

this time i have problem with a simulink model. the problem is there are 2 equtions depending on x and angle theta. i have derived the system of equations using lagrange system of equations but somehow i am not able to start with block diagram of simulink model to investigate the system dynamics. could you suggest something i have gone through your tutorial of the bucket harvey model but this problem seems to complex to model like inverted pendulum.

At this point, enough is enough!!! We were able to help out on the power series since we knew a thing or two about it, but Person B took it a bit too far. We are not here to solve your problems for you. If you need help on a particular aspect that involves one of our tutorials or an application of it, we will try to answer you to the best of our ability, assuming that it does not take too long. We have things to do too!

I can only imagine how many requests for help the guys over at the Matworks blog receive (i.e. Ken, Doug, Loren, and company).

How do other people deal with leechers? How do you deal with people who ask for too much help? Where do you draw the line? I would love to hear how other people deal with this sensitive topic.