The Geeky Junkyard of kingler

After upgrading to SP3, my Matlab codes simply stopped working. By looking into the error, I found out that it is a bug that existed in version 6 but was later fixed in version 7 (sp1, sp2).

Exact Steps and Code to Reproduce Bug:
test = zeros([402653185,1],'uint8');
% It worked if you change to 402653184


Error Messages:
??? Error using ==> zeros
Maximum variable size allowed by the program is exceeded.


Anyway, the Matlab support team gave me a workaround: create two matrix of smaller sizes and concat them together.
test1 = zeros([3e8,1],'uint8');
test = [test1 ; test1];
clear test1;


For me, I don’t want to modify all my codes, so I had to revert back to R14SP2. Hopefully the next version of Matlab could fix this bug.

Since the release of MATLAB 7, I have had problems with it running on Mac OS X.
The java interface in the original release crashes every 5 minutes or so, which makes it almost impossible to work. The 7.0.1 update fixed most of the problems, but still vulnerable in some occasions (mainly graphics related). Even the latest 7.0.4 update offers little improvement in that aspect.
The crashing problem I assume is mainly due to the vulnerability of the java engine on Mac OS X. I’d highly recommend users to run MATLAB without the java virtual machine.