I noticed it was taking 6-7 seconds to read in a wfile (scalar surface overlay) into matlab using fast_read_wfile.m. In case anybody else finds this annoying, here's a faster alternative that produces identical output:

in fast_read_wfile.m, replace everything after the first fread line with:

vnum = fast_fread3(fid) ; % Number of non-zero values
A = uint32(fread(fid,vnum*7,'uchar'));
fclose(fid);

v = bitshift(A(1:7:end), 16) + bitshift(A(2:7:end),8) + A(3:7:end);
w0 = bitshift(A(4:7:end),24) + bitshift(A(5:7:end),16) + bitshift(A(6:7:end),8) + A(7:7:end);

w = zeros(max(v),1);
w(v+1) = typecast(w0,'single');

-Keith