Archive for November, 2007
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
IDL 7.0 released
IDL 7.0 is officially released today. This introduces the IDL Workbench, a cross platform, Eclipse-based development environment. My favorite features so far:
it works the same on Unix platforms!
in the debug perspective, you can click on any level in the call stack and examine all the variables defined at that level
the outline view (I just […]
2 Comments » - Posted in IDL, News by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
FastDL 2.4 released
FastDL 2.4 was released today. FastDL provides a way to do cluster computing from within IDL in two different flavors: mpiDL and TaskDL. For problems which require communication between nodes, mpiDL provides an interface to the MPI standard. If you are familiar with MPI, then mpiDL should be very easy to use. It can now […]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, News, Optimization by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007
Data vs datum
I have always been annoyed at the supposedly correct usage of the word “data”. Now I have justification to use “data” the way I want.
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
Vis-o-Matic
I just saw this parody of scientific visualizations, the Viz-o-Matic. Not sure if it was, but we could do this in IDL (although I’m not sure about how easy it would have been in 1993).
This reminds me of the swivel.com presenter at Vis07 talking about the “bling my graph” option on swivel.
Via Tufte […]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Monday, November 19th, 2007
Updates to X11 for Leopard
The X.org Wiki has a page for updates for XDarwin. I was still having some issues (with CURSOR) that these updates fixed. The two lines that will do the updates are:
curl -LO http://people.freedesktop.org/~jeremyhu/x11-apple/x11_update.sh
sudo sh x11_update.sh
UPDATE: it appears you should get your updates here now. I still have X problems, but things are definitely […]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Mac by Michael Galloy
Friday, November 16th, 2007
LIC flow visualization
I have been searching for a better visualization for vector fields for awhile. Line integral convolution (LIC) is one of several methods that seems promising.
The main references I used for my LIC implementation is the original paper “Imaging Vector Fields Using Line Integral Convolution” by Brian Cabral and Leith (Casey) Leedom and this C++ […]
6 Comments » - Posted in IDL, Information design by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
IDL 7.0 User’s Group Meeting
The IDL 7.0 User’s Group Meeting was tonight. From the ITT VIS website:
Be the First to See the New IDL 7.0!!
Please join us for the IDL User Group Meeting & Reception co-sponsored by ITT Visual Information Solutions and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics(LASP) on November 13, 2007. Hear from IDL engineers and professionals […]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, News by Michael Galloy
Monday, November 12th, 2007
Stopping xterm from launching
This is just one more piece of the X11.app puzzle in Leopard. Because /etc/X11 is gone in Leopard, the old way of configuring X11.app is obsolete. The new way is org.x.X11_launcher.plist. So the following,
defaults write org.x.X11_launcher app_to_run /usr/X11/bin/xlsclients
is the way to configure X11.app to not start an xterm every time it starts.
UPDATE: changed from […]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Mac by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
Quick Look for IDL .pro files
Quick Look is a handy feature of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. It allows you to view the contents of a file without actually opening it. I’ve found it extremely useful for browsing files.
Of course, out of the box, Leopard doesn’t understand IDL .pro files because ITT VIS doesn’t provide a real application for […]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Mac by Michael Galloy
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
Terminal scripting in Leopard
This is an interesting article about using some of the new scripting features in Leopard’s Terminal to visually indicate which server you are logged into.
I tried using Terminal again in Leopard, but soon went back to iTerm. I use iTerm with a prompt of
export PS1=”\[\e]1;\h\a\e]2;\h:\w\a\e[34;1m\]\W\$\[\e[0m\] “
which uses the server name as the tab […]
