Archive for December, 2007
Friday, December 21st, 2007
GPULib pre-release
A pre-release of GPULib was made available today. GPULib is a library of common scientific computational routines that use modern graphics processing units (GPUs) to improve performance. I saw speedups of 5-50 times faster than normal IDL code for example code I was writing. Vectorized code that is still not fast enough can be improved […]
5 Comments » - Posted in IDL, News, Optimization by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
IDL 7.0.1 Workbench update
Today, ITT VIS released an update to the IDL 7.0 Workbench the speeds up the “Analyzing code” process when the Workbench starts (and gives you a progress level). The details are in a newsgroup post by Bill Okubo. ITT VIS says the update is four times faster and it certainly does seem much faster to […]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, News by Michael Galloy
Monday, December 10th, 2007
Command line IDL for Windows!
Previously available only on Unix platforms, a command line version of IDL was released today by Abraham Campbell. It has a few additional features compared to the Unix version, such as:
IDL MP mode allows you to create multiple IDL processes and manipulate them
TAB command matching
See this comp.lang.idl-pvwave post for the announcement and the codebank for […]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, News by Michael Galloy
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
LIC flow code
I was hoping to speed up the code I mentioned last month implementing a line integral convolution (LIC) flow visualization, but I haven’t had time to improve it (and probably won’t for awhile). I would like to eventually write this as a DLM, but until then here’s my pure IDL draft. It contains a main-level […]
7 Comments » - Posted in IDL, Information design by Michael Galloy
Thursday, December 6th, 2007
Google charting API
Google released a seriously cool charting API today. The data and options about its presentation (not as many as IDL, but quite a few) are encoded into the URL of the image. Of course, there are plenty of chartjunk options, but it seems quite possible to make some serviceable graphs. The one thing I […]
3 Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Monday, December 3rd, 2007
Pictures of Numbers blog
I recently discovered Mike Dickison’s Pictures of Numbers blog. He keeps the quality very high (posting only when he has a polished article, averaging just over one post per month for the last two years). For example, past articles discuss:
General tips for improving visualizations like the “Better Axes” article.
Book reviews like this one for Tufte’s […]
