Archive for October, 2006
Monday, October 30th, 2006
IDL online help search
I like using links to the IDL online help when posting to comp.lang.idl-pvwave, but it’s often hard to find the link that corresponds to the online help page I’m viewing in the IDL Assistant. You can use some of the advanced features of your favorite search engine to narrow a normal web search down to […]
No Comments » - Posted in Admin, IDL by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Information Visualization by Colin Ware
I went to a talk titled “Effective Flow Visualization” by Colin Ware at NOAA last Friday. Dr. Ware works on issues of scientific visualization from an angle that was new to me: he studies human perception of visualizations. An interesting aspect of this study is that he tries to objectively measure the effectiveness of […]
No Comments » - Posted in Book reviews, Information design by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
Local grid points
Recently I had to find the neighbors in a 3 by 3 by 3 grid around a given point in 3D space. J.D. Smith’s Dimensional Juggling Tutorial has a lot of similar use of the reform. and rebin routines, but mostly for the purpose of “inflating” a dimension of an array. This problem called […]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Optimization by Michael Galloy
Sunday, October 8th, 2006
Cyclone tracks image
This image (8000 x 4000) was a featured image in the tropical cyclone article on Wikipedia. From the description of the image on Wikipedia:
This map shows the tracks of all Tropical cyclones which formed worldwide from 1985 to 2005. The points show the locations of the storms at six-hourly intervals…
The image was created […]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006
A simple 3D object graphics example
The main problem that programmers new to object graphics have is getting anything to appear on the screen (at least anything they recognize). Once you have your graphics appearing in a window, it’s pretty simple to change their properties, rotate them, make them dance the rhumba, etc.
There are various ways to scale your data into […]
3 Comments » - Posted in IDL, Object graphics by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
Online help is online
The online help for IDL (since IDL 6.2) is plain HTML normally displayed using the “IDL Assistant.” It would be convenient if ITTVIS would publish it on their website. Then people in the IDL community could say things like: “Check out the congrid routine.” Fortunately, the online help for IDL 6.3 is available on NASA’s […]
