Archive for May, 2006
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
Webpages as graphs
“Websites as Graphs” is a cool idea to give a graphical depiction of the structure of a webpage. Each node in the graph represents a tag in the page. The graph is a tree with the HTML tag of the page as the root. The webpage parser can take any URL and make a graph […]
2 Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Friday, May 26th, 2006
mySociety: Travel-time maps
mySociety has produced a set of beautiful color-coded maps of travel-times (red for near, blue for far) by public transit from a given location. They have produced a few maps with fixed starting locations (all in the UK) at various scales.
This is a interesting concept; it will be useful for me when I can […]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Thursday, May 25th, 2006
Dashboard widget: 1RM
1RM (”one rep maximum”) is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” that calculates the maximum amount you can lift given a submaximum lift. So for example, if I can lift 75 pounds 10 times, then according to the widget below, I should be able to lift 100 pounds once (as seen […]
6 Comments » - Posted in Mac by Michael Galloy
Thursday, May 18th, 2006
Tags for IDLdoc’ed code
The previous article about IDLdoc showed how to get and run IDLdoc on your library without changing any of your code. Now, what if you are willing to add special tags to your comments for IDLdoc's use?
So here is just the header of the mg_n_smallest routine with a few of the most common tags in [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in IDL, IDLdoc by Michael Galloy
Monday, May 15th, 2006
Bridge suicide map
This graphic is a bit morbid, but is well done and quite powerful. It indicates the location of each suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge from the time it opened in 1937. A related graphic presents deaths per year.
Two pieces of data I kept wishing were displayed were the height of the bridge at each [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Thursday, May 11th, 2006
SGI Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
I wonder what SGI's chapter 11 filing (Slashdot and Yahoo!) will do for IDL support for SGI workstations? Dennis P. McKenna, the recently appointed, Chairman and CEO of SGI seemed optimistic about SGI's future. From the Yahoo! article, McKenna said:
We expect to proceed quickly and will emerge from these proceedings with a significantly [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006
The TEMPORARY function
The TEMPORARY routine is a simple way to use memory more efficiently. Statements of the form
a = a + 5
create a temporary variable to hold the intermediate result a + 5. This temporary variable effectively doubles the amount of memory needed to store a (but only for the time necessary to do the operation). This [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in IDL, Optimization by Michael Galloy
Friday, May 5th, 2006
Cassini-Huygens Titan landing movie
This movie shows a lot of information about the Huygens probe as it lands on Titan. See the movie's page for a description of the data sets visualized.
I think this is an amazing piece of work. From the perspective of the design of the visualization, there are two things I find interesting about this video:
the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Thursday, May 4th, 2006
Subscribe! It’s free…
RSS is a web technology to allow for distribution of regularly published information: web pages, audio/video files, PDFs, etc. The main advantage is that subscribers easily see when new material is posted.
There are many applications, known as aggregators, which will watch an RSS feed and list all the content available from each site. Popular [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Admin by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006
An Introduction to Programming with IDL by Kenneth P. Bowman
There aren't many third party IDL books: David Fanning has one, Liam Gumley has one, and Ronn Kling has three. Now Ken Bowman, a professor at Texas A&M University in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, enters the fray with An Introduction to Programming with IDL. This book is geared towards a new user of IDL [...]
